I'm Not Well, But I'm Better
by The Voice in the Wilderness
Summary: Be careful trying to save the world one person at a time if you're guilty of kicking yourself in the teeth. To a friend who requested dark S&M of Rin and Naraku. Naraku is a sadistic physician with a dark secret, Rin's a nurse with a complex soul. A/U & X
1. Chapter 1

Title: I'm Not Well, But I'm Better  
Characters: Rin, and Naraku, mainly - we'll see who else show's up  
Genre: I don't knowwwwww... pr0nish suspense, maybe? I'd like to go for a Daschel Hammett-sort of vibe, without the private eye schtick  
Universe: AU, a modernish sort of world, not dissimilar from our own  
Word Count: A lot... over 2,500 and I'm just getting into it - epic, ya dig? Everything involving Naraku seems to want to be epic in scope and length... I just don't know when to let him go.  
Rating: Adult  
Summary: Saving the world one person at a time is a dangerous business; good and evil are just easy easy words for your mouth to say.

A/N: All copywritten characters are the sole properties of their respective owners. I own nothing InuYasha-related except a set of DVDs. I make no money and intend no infringement.

"You are late on your rounds, Nurse Taisho."

Dark red eyes glared over the isolation mask but she could still feel the sneer and could still picture the thin line of this demon's lips twisting in anger over her perceived tardiness for grand rounds.

He wouldn't care what her excuse was – she could have been elbows deep in an open cardiac massage during some hellish trauma and Rin Taisho knew Dr. Onigumo could have cared less. She truly hated the man. How he had become an intensivist was anyone's unholy guess. Mail order form Dr. Mengele's School of Medicine was her personal opinion.

"Yes Doctor, I am sorry.", Rin kept her dark brown eyes suitably lowered in as much false chagrin as she could muster for this egotistical monster and as his tall back turned upon her with a disdainful snort, she stuck her tongue out and gave him a rather rude send-off.

"Rin!" Higurashsi Kagome, this morning's charge nurse on the unit hissed angrily and shooed her off with the Good Doctor Onigumo for grand rounds. Rin knew her friend Kagome was just jealous she didn't think of the raspberry first; hell, all the nurses, most of the respiratory therapists and even some of the house keeping staff hated Onigumo. He was a fucking menace to the living and the dead, in her opinion.

Grabbing the nearest isolation mask from a container on the wall, Rin composed herself and taking two large professionally cleansing breaths (she hoped goddamnit) let herself quietly into the small cramped private room where Onigumo was holding court. His back was to her and by the look upon the pt.'s wan face Rin could tell the news had not been good. It hardly ever was on this floor; you were either fine and going home or you were dying – and going home. The ICU was after all, at its basest nature, a transient place.

"You can't breathe because you smoke, Mr. Kyosuke. Let me guess, sir – you continue to smoke even now, prior to your admission." Onigumo's voice fell like lead without an once of compassion; he was passing judgment. Rin hated the uncaring flippancy she imagined she heard in that somehow deep, merciless voice. If she had been further through the door she might has been able to tell herself the Doctor's eyes appeared saddened by his poor prognosis, that in the end it saddened him just a tiny bit to tell another soul there was little time and no hope. Anger forced its way hard up Rin's belly and into her throat but she was a professional. If Doctor Onigumo was the devil, she would be a compassionate angel – as much as she hated it when nurses were compared as such, she would stay with this patient after the orders were decreed and the physician had both literally and figuratively washed his hands of poor Mr. Kyosuke. Rin could be rude, she could be stubborn, hell – she could really be a little bitch when she put her head into it, but she was compassionate! Could Onigumo hear her grinding her teeth behind her white mask? Probably. She figured he was smiling, the prick.

Tossing his complexly braided hair behind him in a measured way, Onigumo performed a physical exam. "Breathe, sir." He commanded impatiently, stethoscope poised over the bony, heaving chest.

"I'm trying, Doctor but I just can-", Kyosuke's breathy, straggling voice struggled out. He was drowning in air, gasping in the beginning of true respiratory failure. Rin wanted to hold his frail hand and encourage him to concentrate on his oxygen mask – in through the nose, out the mouth. But then she'd be in Doctor Mengele's way – ooh, she had to stop calling him that! She was going to slip up one of these days and say it out loud!

"That's our problem, isn't it, Mr. Kyosuke? I'm afraid this is why we tell the public that they should not smoke." Onigumo nearly spat in self-righteous smugness as he straightened his tall back and replaced his stethoscope in his dark purple lab coat.

"Nurse Taisho, you will assist this man to sit on the side of the bed, now." he commanded looking out the small window into the asphalt jungle below.

Gently Rin eased the thin, skeletal man to sit up, and then put his feet over the side of the skinny mattress. His legs and feet were swollen and his skin was a nasty sallow color Rin didn't like at all. He had a day, maybe a day and a half left on this Earth and he had to deal with Oni-fucking-gumo. Poor, poor man. Rin held Kyosuke forward as he huffed and puffed, completely winded from the tiny exertion it had taken to reposition. His face was grey and Rin found herself looking at the room's oxygen set up, what would be needed for compressions and suction and the defibrillator and… then watched the clock – so she'd know when to time the code. The patient eventually caught his breath enough to return to his baseline and Rin relaxed, minutely. She heard some hollow tapping and when Onigumo's hard eyes met her own, she knew it was going to be a messy, ugly day.

Onigumo eyes were narrowed, the dark red irises boring into her with something she never hoped to see. Rin was very, very glad she could not see most of the monster's hard pale face. He was smiling at her.

She narrowed her eyes back and instinctively hugged poor Mr. Kyosuke.

"Thorocentesis kit, size 7 sterile gloves, 1 red top, 2 purple and 1 green top specimen tubes and you will assist me, Nurse Taisho." Naraku Onigumo listed out across the patient's thin back. He then did something that froze her blood just a little; Doctor Naraku Onigumo, the devil incarnate and her sworn professional enemy, winked at her.

Rin was so shocked she nearly dropped Mr. Kyosuke when he leaned against her to cough.

Onigumo began a very well-practiced spiel about what exactly a thorocentesis entailed, why it was necessary and causally glossed right over the risks it might entail.

"Of course there is always the risk of perforation, infection, pneumothorax, or collapsed lung, hemothorax or blood in the lungs and/or death. I'd say given your current prognosis, Mr. Kyosuke, those things are the least of your worries but it is for legal reasons I must tell you these things. Do you agree to the procedure, sir?" Onigumo ended on a confrontational note, daring the patient to refuse his most honored help.

To refuse his most delicious fun.

It made Rin sick to her stomach to see the confusion and last embers of a dying hope for recovery light the old man's rheumy eyes. She could tell Kyosuke had no idea what Onigumo had just said other than the long word was necessary and involved fluid off of his lungs. This was the Doctor, and the Doctor was God so this must be what had to be done. Without question he whispered a sibilant, "Yes, I agree." giving Onigumo a watery, wan smile through his oxygen mask that the looming Doctor ignored utterly.

"Put that bedside table under him, Taisho and let him lean on it. Now, supplies please." All the emphasis was on the "now" – the "please" was like a fart in the wind, obscene and gone before you knew it. Rin helped the elderly man into position, turned up his oxygen a smidge to help him through the procedure and exited to do as the Lord God Onigumo had commanded.

"Kagome, where are the thorocentesis kits and I need consent for Room 7113; Onigumo's gonna tap him now." Rin called to her coworker at the main desk as she went in search of gloves, gowns and hazmat supplies. When she found all that was required, Rin Taisho, RN picked up her consent form in one swift, economical move and returned to Yuugi Kyosuke's room.

"That took far too much time, didn't it?" Onigumo lobbed archly at her as Rin closed the door. "I was under the impression that ICU nurses were more professional."

Rin was seeing red, and the next words out her mouth dropped past her surgical mask without any warning. "Well, after working with you, Doctor Onigumo, it's only natural for your habits to rub off on me, sir." Rin snarked out with all the fake nicety she could muster. Onigumo's wide eyes were like a breath of fresh air and Rin nearly cheered herself for her cleverness, then she remembered the patient… and swallowing quickly went about the business of setting up and getting the consent signed. Onigumo nearly tore the top off the thorocentesis kit in his quiet fury. Squirting out iodine, he nearly slammed the debris left over into the biohazard bag. Rin bit her lip behind her mask; she really had pissed the high and mighty Doctor Onigumo off righteously. Biting her lip helped keep her from giggling; Rin knew giggling would be doom. But kami above, it was a close one!

A thorocentsis needle is a long one and it was always quite disconcerting to watch the foot long thing disappear into a person's body with really very little resistance. Onigumo met her eyes only once more during the procedure, just before the physician would inject a little subcutaneous anesthetic around the incision site and Rin was appalled when Onigumo grabbed the small glass vial of anesthetic and shook it at her – then tossed it into the biohazard bag with the trash. He was going to insert a foot long needle into a patient's chest without anesthetic – just because he was pissy with her? Not wanting to alert the patient prepped and draped for sterility, Rin narrowed her eyes above her mask and cursed Onigumo over and over in her angry mind.

She heard a pop, Kyosuke tightened up with a pained hiss and then clutched onto both her and the table before him for the next 15 minutes. Onigumo continued working on the back of the old man with his usual cold-mannered precision.

"Hand me a syringe."

"Yes, Doctor – here."

"Label the specimens for the lab – I want cultures. Now, please."

"Of course. Do you want the results also faxed to your office?"

"Yes." To Mr. Kyosuke, Onigumo directed his deep voice, "There was quite a bit more fluid there than anticipated, sir – have you ever been diagnosed with hepatitis?"

"I'm not sure, doctor…" the patient stammered, sounding worried.

"Well, I'm not surprised. Add a hepatitis titer to the specimen orders, Taisho. That will be all. Put pressure on this dressing for at least 3 minutes. We're finished; good day, Mr. Kyosuke. You will be transferred to hospice tomorrow should you be here to see it." Onigumo proclaimed, stripped his long white hands of his gloves and left the room without looking at either Rin or his poor patient, hunched over the bedside table. White lines of pain began to ease on the old man's face and Rin tried to make small talk and keep pressure on his back as she leaned protectively over him.

"Did it hurt as much as you feared, Mr. Kyosuke? At least now you have more room to breathe with all that fluid off your chest." Rin smiled down at the white fringed head at her shoulder.

"Nurse, it hurt a great deal and now I'm afraid I'm too scared to breathe. What does it matter if I have hepatitis if I am dying now? What does any of this matter if I am dying?" he nearly wailed in a breathless rush, rubbing his small nose on her sleeve.

She loathed Onigumo, she really did – he was the worst kind of sadist, egotistical butcher… c'mon – be professional Rin, channel some of that detached and logical demeanor Dad was so famous for, she chided herself.

"If Doctor Onigumo's treatment has given you another day, another two days with your family, then it was worth it, right?", she softly cradled the old dying man with her voice and left him no room for argument. What was done was done and that included him.

~*~

When Rin returned to the main desk to continue grand rounds, she was met with a pair of huge, worried eyes from Kagome. Looking over her friend 's thin shoulder and scanning the computers the physicians used to dictate and do non-bedside work, Rin hoped to see a furious Onigumo hunched over a terminal, scaring the bejesus out a transcriptionist with his rancor. She wanted him to remember it, dwell on and never forget it was her, a lowly handmaiden, a veritable insect that made the great Naraku Onigumo, MD impotent with fury!

"He's not here, Rin. He slammed his charts down on the rack and stalked out of here without saying a word. He looked like a demon in that creepy coat of his. God, that man is a freaky weirdo, and Rin – you are going to be in deep shit…" (whispered because Kagome was from a religious family and kind of a good girl that way)"… if he submits this little incident to the head Nursing officer!" Kagome worried as she put orders into her computer with well-practiced ease.

"What incident? You weren't even there, Kagome!" Rin whispered back, tiptoes flexing as she leaned over the mammoth counter in aggravation.

"I don't have to be there Rin – I know you…" Kagome chided and tossed her pen across the chart she was working on. "After work, the bar – you and me. Pronto. I want to hear every single incriminating word, Rin."

"What? Why?" Rin smirked at her friend and bounced on one small foot.

"Why? Because you're fucked, that's why!" Kagome hissed out with comic intensity and yanked on Rin's collar.

"Kagome! Such language! Call me on my cell when you're clocking out and we'll go together." Patting down one of her many pockets Rin checked for her cell phone – except it wasn't there. It was always there. Work phone in one pocket, real-life phone in the other, always! Swinging her fists in a show of mock tantrum, Rin railed at the universe for what seemed like the umpteenth time today.

"What's the matter with you now, you nut?" Kagome leveled an eyebrow at her groaning friend. With Rin it was all fun and games until someone lost an eye – then it was just fun. But really, the girl was the most compassionate nurse Kagome had ever worked with and that was something which made the prick Onigumo want to torment her so much. Rin made him look awful.

Why were all the pretty ones dumb or evil? Kagome mused to herself and told her frustrated friend to backtrack her steps. It wasn't a large unit; the phone had to be somewhere.

"Check the thorocentesis trays, oh I know – go check the biohazard bins! Maybe you threw it in the red bag with the wet stuff." Kagome giggled out and went back to her work.

"Oh man, gross! I sure as hell hope I didn't do that…" Rin moaned and slumped off to look for her missing phone.


	2. Chapter 2

Rin slumped in front of her locker. Kami but it had been a damn day! Onigumo's fracas was just the start. At least no one coded, no one extubated themselves by ripping a breathing tube out of their throats and no one sprung an arterial line leak. Yeah, all and all - not physically taxing, more like mentally and patience-taxing.

Kagome had called the main desk to tell Rin she was going out the door and would meet her at the bar. Rin had given up on the cell phone after lunch and multiple failed attempts at locating it. She had called the thing a hundred times but there was no sign of it on the floor and no one answered it. Eventually, it must have run out of juice because it just kept going straight to voice mail. Finally in fit of frustration Rin left herself a message.

"_Hi Rin, this is Rin and if you are hearing this message, congratulations! You no longer have your head up someone else's ass! Isn't that great? Remember, the finder of this phone will win an all-expenses paid trip to their own personal hell, which happens to be one night filled with delicious sexual torment by none other than that warm ball of fuzzy cuteness, Doctor Naraku Onigumo! Careful, ladies, he's probably a fag Shangri-La wrapped in Happy Fun Candy! Yeah!"_

The beep cut her off on the second cheer but venting her crazed aggravation did make Rin feel a whole lot better. Smiling to herself as she replaced the phone on its cradle in the empty break-room, Rin grabbed her bag and keys and went out to do the other thing guaranteed to make her smile. She was going to go shopping for something slinky to wear out to the bar tonight; she was off work the next three days – time to live it up!

~*~

"Rin! Over here!" Kagome waved from a barstool. The girl behind the bar gave her an embarrassed glance and when her eyes meet Rin's, the age-old question was plainly implied: What'll ya have?

"Scotch – do you have Coal Ila?"

A blank look flew across the bartender's face.

" No? Oban?"

One more time… with feeling…

"Damn – uh, Glenlivet?" Rin tried again, hopefully.

Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner, Rin mused sarcastically.

"Ok. How old?" she asked over the canned music.

"12 and 14", was the slightly testy reply. Bartenders hate questions. That means they have to talk to customers.

"A shot of the 14, on the rocks please." Rin replied and made her way over to Kagome, only having to straighten her new dress once – the damn thing seemed to want to float off her body rather than stay on. Cream and dark orange silk floated down around her black booted legs as she strode purposefully up to her friend's proffered seat.

"Damn girl, how can you drink that shit? It tastes like paint thinner. And you look nice – only you could pull off those two colors together, Rin. The boots are a nice touch, it looks like you're out to stomp someone's ass tonight!" Kagome enthused over some kind of red fruity business with a little umbrella stuck in its frozen slushy depths.

"How many of those have you had Kagome?" Rin smiled crookedly and paid for her well-delivered drink. Taking a sip, she decided it wasn't terribly watered down… today.

Rin caught the bartender, Sakura, with her raised glass and gave the woman an extra 10 bucks. It paid to make the bartender your friend when you planned on drinking for a while. Sakura smiled, leaned over the bar and kissed Rin quickly on the cheek.

"Rin!" Kagome squeaked out and grabbed her arm with a giggle.

"What? She's just doing it to start it up with the blue-collars who want to see hot women get it on in public. It's guaranteed she'll make triple the tips now and she knows it. Now, you were saying how many drinks it's going to take to catch up with you, girl?" Rin smiled down and parked herself on her barstool.

"Two – counting this one. So – you have a lot of explaining to do, missy. What the hell happened today? What did you do to Onigumo? Oh – did you find your phone?" Kagome enthused and leaned forward eagerly, awaiting her well-deserved answer.

Rin turned this way and that on her stool, hooking her booted heels into the thing and blowing her bangs out in annoyance. Figures Kagome would want to talk about that! Turning towards the dark side on the bar, she noticed musicians unloading gear through a propped-open door. An apparently albino woman was part of the group trudging in mic stands, and her dark pink eyes found Rin's with a blankly defiant stare. Rin looked over the woman's shoulder with a slow blink, shrugging off the defiant glare and turned back to her tipsy friend. She had no quarrel with the woman; she was healer, not a fighter.

"Never found the fucking phone. But when I do - there's going to be some goofy shit to delete. No – never mind, Well basically, the short version is, Onigumo was being his usual sadistic and obnoxious motherfucking self…"

"Oh my god Rin, your father would cringe if he could hear your mouth!" Kagome tittered.

"Father would have kicked Onigumo in the fucking teeth today at his lack of honor. You know that asshole accused a dying man of killing himself with cigarettes, attacked my professionalism in front of a patient and then, oh Kagome, then he tapped the old man without anesthetic – to get back at me when I basically told him it took one to know one!", Rin snarled out with uncharacteristic anger.

"He did what?! He did not! Kami, how I would have loved to be there! I'll bet his pretty white face was just priceless!" Kagome spewed with not a little high girlish laughter. Rin took a gulp of her drink and reflected on cooling down. Retelling the events of the day had really pissed her off anew.

The band had set up their board and monitors and the dissonant strains of delayed and distorted guitar began to slink under the slurring purr of a song Rin hadn't heard in about 15 years… perfect. This musical dystopia suited her mood perfectly – that was, until the booze kicked in. When it did, she knew she would do her best to bury herself in the sonic numbness until the pain of trying to save the world one person at a time wore down to an easily-ignored dull roar. It beat being sober and alone with a stick.

"There's nothing pretty about that guy, Kagome. He's brutal." Rin deadpanned and shot the rest of her drink. Hitching her chin at Sakura, whose friendship had been thoroughly bought for the evening it seemed, Rin found another single-malt quickly sweating in her hands.

"Come on, Rin – you can't tell me that if it was dark, you were drunk and he didn't say anything too stupid, you wouldn't find Dr. Onigumo just this side of delicious in a dark, forbidden kind of way.", Kagome wheedled, scanning the bar.

"You must be 'shrooming…" Rin smiled and watched the musicians finish their sound check. There were a few people: singles, two's, three's pulled up to the various low tables around the slight chaos of a large band in a tight corner. A group of twenty-something's apparently out in the full glory of stainless piercings and black everything were doing their best to glower at the straights and simultaneously talk amongst themselves. Rin envied them their camaraderie. She herself had been alone since her adopted father had gone on a business trip and never returned ten years ago. It was like he had gone for a long walk and simply never come back. Rin never really had fit in anywhere even before his disappearance and so she sometimes noticed when she went out with her (singular) friend Kagome that all her urges to care for others, to ease pain and suffering probably stemmed from never assuaging those feelings within herself. Shaking her head at her rueful self-analysis, Rin took another drink.

The band started up about a half-hour later and playing an interesting, if derivative set of alt-rock covers. Kagome was dancing on her stool with her drink in between pestering Rin with gossip about work. There were more people out and the night scraped on the windows to come in. People came and went. Rin was chewing the ice in her latest dead soldier and trying to decide if she needed another drink. Things were getting fuzzy edges and the band's light set was really throwing weird shadows across people's faces. She liked the idea that someone could be anyone under those oozing lights.

The band dropped down into a weirdly delayed acoustic bit that Rin remembered all too well. The woman singing shook her long jade earrings and strummed a bass slowly as she shut her eyes and began to wail.

_Down in a hole and I don't know if I can be saved…_

"Fuck it.", Rin swore and putting her spent drink on the bar determined to get this party started. She wanted merriment after her horrendous day. Because, she thought as she began to sway and slide to the heavy throb of the music around her…

_I'd like to fly but my wings have been so denied…_

Because she knew she was just going to have to repeat her one-woman war against pain and death tomorrow and the next day after that…in her heart she had begun to despair.

Twisting, swaying her hips, she caught covertly appreciative glances from the dark and gothic children she'd noticed earlier. Turning around, she glanced around for Kagome as she thrust one smooth hip out in the vaguely exotic way she'd learned from some half-assed belly dance workout tape she'd gotten somewhere. Before she met her friend's eyes, she noticed a long form stretched lazily in a deep chair, just out of the light. She noticed long pale fingers like spiders slowly flexing over the chair's arms and two reflecting lens looking her way. Something looked… off… about the guy. He appeared to have been poured into the chair and was somehow melting out of it onto the floor. He looked like a stoned leopard waiting for something to happen.

Was it live or was it Memorex? Rin thought to herself and then found the smiling Kagome paying for her scotch. That gave her an excuse to catch her breath and point out the freak to Kagome – who enjoyed people-watching as much as she enjoyed cheerleader punch.

A kid with two steel rings in his lip and a blond Mohawk smiled at her as she passed to make her way back to the bar and nonchalantly ran his hand across her silk-shrouded thigh as she walked by.

"Nice, girl. Keep it up. I'm Hakkaku." he leered wolfishly at her and dared Rin to say something about his trespass against her.

Rin ignored it; shit, that was as lucky as she was going to get tonight, most likely. She didn't like wolfish men; they scared her somehow.

"Hey, Kagome. Come here." Rin said to her friend over the music. Kagome leaned carefully forward and was all ears.

"Look at that guy over there; he wins the freak award, right?" Rin pointed with her chin at the long dark figure whose black hair was nearly hitting the floor he had slumped so far within his seat.

"What – is he tired? Long black hair, he must be Onigumo's hippy twin." Kagome snorted to herself and elbowed Rin in the side happily.

"Ugh – jeeze, can we just leave it alone, already! You know, I left a silly message on my missing phone calling him a fag and offering him as prize to the person who found my stupid cell. You'd have been proud; I was pissed I'd lost it on top of everything else. Oh well. Hey, get off that chair and come dance with me. Maybe if we do others will join in and we won't look like complete and utter tools!" Rin replied, grabbing Kagome's hands and pulling her off the barstool.

"Oh we're going to look like idiots all right – I can't dance and you know it. I'll probably trip on my own feet and bust my nose." Kagome laughed and straightened her filmy top.

"I'll take the risk, I'm nimble – you go down and you're going down alone, girl! Besides, my friends over there need someone else to drool over." Rin smirked and met the eyes of her steel-encased admirer, who winked at her.

Of course it was then that the band decided to change gears totally. The guitarist had busted a string on the last song and was furiously repairing, stage-left. The albino girl working the boards came up next to the pretty dark-haired singer beginning to purr out a rather familiar tune over a jazz beat the drummer was brushing out.

_Holly came from Miami, FLA – hitch-hiked her way across the USA_

_Plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs then he was a she_

_She said hey babe – take a walk on the wild side._

The albino girl did the appropriate accompaniment and Rin was surprised to hear such an arcane song. Kagome looked a little lost and not a little drunk so Rin started simple, moving to the beat. The singer enjoined the crowd to join in, 'cuz you freaks all know the damn words and continued to improvise a rather slinky bass solo while keeping an eye on the guitarist at work.

_And all the colored girls go, 'Kohaku, you fag, hurry up and fix your damn guitar…"_

Obviously, this sort of thing had happened to this band before…

Rin laughed with everyone else and found the hypnotic rhythm was making the world swing a little bit on a tilted axis so she went with it. Turning around, she noticed a couple of girls squirming in their seats with smiles toward the band. The next time she made another gyrating rotation, she noted quite a few people had joined them on the dance floor. Miracles never ceased, because Kagome was still on her feet, probably because she was dancing with Mohawk Guy now. Good thing it appeared he could lead, Rin mused with a grin.

Rin was enjoying herself thoroughly when the instinctive need hit her hard: too many drinks and too small a bladder. Never mind the extensive bladder-denial training Rin, like every other nurse, had cultivated by being always too busy to pee; she decided the crowd could do without her mostly drunk and benevolent presence for a few moments. Nosing her way through the crowd, Rin's balance was still good but the world did seem to be swaying a bit, now didn't it? Something hit her leg as she nearly made it to the bathroom doors and by the sick, electronic crunching noise Rin knew it was not going to be good. She'd just knocked someone's phone out of their hand or something. Cursing her luck and turning back from her important mission, Rin was about to apologize for her clumsiness.

A small silver box had been shattered and apparently trampled by a size 6 heeled boot remarkably like hers – funny, that. Truthfully, the phone was the same model as hers too, but her phone had a lanyard, Rin noted drunkenly and then followed her eyes with a slight delay to the person sitting closest to her faux pas. The band continued on to another dark, smoldering tune…the guitarist, Kohaku had a high creepy voice that harmonized weirdly with the singer Kagura's throaty rasp. Their menace transferred too well and Rin shivered as she noticed who she'd bumped into.

_What I see is unreal, I've written my own part – eat of the apple so young, I'm crawling back to start…_

"Congratulations. You found Rin's phone. You win the prize.", the deep evil voice of Naraku Onigumo spoke up to her as he glared up at the shocked Rin, his eyes red fire over a pair of antique cobalt blue sunglasses.

She heard her name from somewhere distant and then she heard a roaring wind as the world spun away into darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

Rin was on a ship, she was swaying with the waves. Weird – she couldn't hear the ocean but she could hear traffic, coming from somewhere. Maybe she needed to open her eyes.

She was hanging over someone's back as they climbed a dark staircase. A dark metal staircase that had her and her unknown transportation very high of a dirty concrete ground came swimming up into her vision.

Dizzying in height, actually.

The world began to tilt, to sway and then Rin noticed it was also cold and wet as rain hit her somewhat numb face. She tried to reach up and wipe her damp hair out of her face but couldn't quite make her hand do what she wanted. She was well and truly tanked.

So, she did the next best thing; she wiped her itching nose on the thick, wet hair next to her face.

"Don't do that again or you're going to learn to fly, woman." growled an oily voice from somewhere.

Rin knew that voice… didn't she? Something about it made her stomach clench in a soggy, rancid way and suddenly she knew she was going to be very, very sick.

"I'm going to be sick… please put me down, whoever you are.", Rin moaned and immediately found herself righted and shoved hard inside the building whose stairs she'd been transported up like a sack of drunken potatoes.

"Oh no, I think not. Pinch your nose shut and take a deep breath. Do it.", the dark voice commanded and strode quickly away from her. Rin steadied herself on the wall with on hand, doing as she was told, trying to keep down her insides. Usually she had a mammoth tolerance for the creature but that scotch seemed to have gotten right on top of her! The dark interior was very warm and close; her vision was watery and amorphous shapes that could have been furniture, could have been monsters oozed and writhed in her grossly altered consciousness.

The dark being returned with a small leather case, opened a lid and after a moment's dexterity had put together some sort of strange object. It was familiar somehow but Rin's foggy mind couldn't quite place it; what was it? Pointy…

"Come here to me.", rasped the tall man who had perched herself on the edge of what appeared to be a couch. Maybe – it could be a couch if it would just quit moving around!

Rin knew this person somehow too… maybe. The waist-length black hair was beginning to get frizzy in the interior heat. Her mind avoided the face, the man's eyes for some uncomfortable reason. He was dressed in very plain black; she couldn't keep looking because his form seemed to be writhing, changing before her sodden eyes. The long black coat he had pushed up slightly but then thought better of it and pushed the sleeve back down. Rin wobbled over as she was told and sat down with modest success, still holding her nose and breathing.

Naraku looked hard at the woman swaying slightly on his couch. She appeared sufficiently intoxicated to not worry about her clinical skills of observation – for the time being. Pushing his dark glasses up into his hair, the physician felt in his pocket for a suitable object… ah, there it was. Perfect. Grabbing Rin's arm at the wrist, he pulled it out straight, hard enough to pull Rin forward with a surprised gurgle. Quickly, he pinned her forearm with his knee, wrapped the leather cellular lanyard around her bicep and shot her up with the hypodermic before she could even think to flinch. Luckily, she was so shocked, Naraku managed to get the needle out of her arm before she backhanded him.

"Bastard! What did you just fucking do to me?!" Rin screamed and roared up off the couch, furious.

Her eyes rolled neatly back up into her pretty skull and she feel into a snoring heap on the floor before her assailant. He smiled at the fact that this Rin had a very strong arm. He tasted blood in his mouth and smiled wider.

Rin's last thought before her injection was this: it was dark as a tomb except for the neighboring bar's flashing neon, then why were this man's pupils pinpoints in a sea of dark red? It didn't make any sense… it didn't make any sense…

Then the pain and then the darkness came for her and she went.

~*~

Rin woke for the second time to the sound of distant traffic. This time the world was no long swinging like some crazy hammock. That was good, she thought stupidly and stretched.

Blinking in the dark, she wiped her drooling mouth with a cool hand. Had she fallen asleep without the blankets again? It was cool and damp and dark in her bedroom wasn't it? Rin looked around on the ceiling at the colorful flashes upon the stained plaster. Seemed like her ceilings were awful high too, weird.

Her right nipple itched, so Rin reached up absentmindedly to scratch. The inside of her elbow stung as she bent her arm and suddenly the evenings event's came flooding back to her in a doomed rush. Turning her head she came face to face with one Naraku Onigumo, himself lying close enough to her turned face that she could see the bruise colored tint to his eyelids. Her eyes got bigger the further they traveled down her companion's body, naked as her own and returned quickly to his hard red eyes staring her down.

"Oh my god…" Rin muttered in sobering shock. She blinked a couple of times just to be absolutely positive. Naraku was still there, his long naked body was still sharing the same bed has her small one. Smiling with a mouth full of sharp teeth, the physician quickly turned her hard back onto the mattress when Rin turned to bolt up out of bed. He straddled her waist and bore her hard into the bed, easily catching her arms across her chest so she couldn't do any hysterical damage to his somewhat vulnerable person.

"What in the hell are you doing, Onigumo, you fucking maniac! Get off of me – right now!" Rin screamed in his grinning face, spraying him with spit.

Leaning forward, Naraku's hair fell over her like a cage, a creepy twining cage as he whispered in her ear, "You won the prize, didn't you? Time to collect, bitch."

"You had my goddamn phone! This whole time, didn't you! You are such a pigfucker, Onigumo! I can't believe this!" Rin raged and twisted her arms in his vice-hard grip, trying to get loose to inflict as much pain as possible.

"Oh I'm a pigfucker all right. I see you haven't aspirated, how nice. The promethazine did its job nicely. You can thank me later when you're screaming." Naraku leered with a nasty laugh and got off of Rin's waist, tossing her arms out of his pale hands.

Rin turned over to sucker-punch her nemesis and found herself twisted painfully around by a fist in her hair. Naraku had dodged her neatly and kneeling upon the mattress, was stretching her back over his body into a position of absolute submission. She swung once back over her shoulder, aiming for his face and was shaken hard with searing intensity, the pain a white-hot fire behind her eyes in an instant.

"If you raise your hand to me again, I'm going to make your prize that much more… fun… and you know very well what kind of things I find fun, Taisho.", Naraku whispered hard in her ear, his lips touching the reddened tissue, making her shiver uncontrollably.

"Think to yourself: Do you really want to anger someone with a very through knowledge of human anatomy and an intimate relationship with pain?" the physician in her ear asked quietly with acidic threat.

"No, I imagine that would not be in my best interest, would it, Doctor?" Rin matched his falsely nice tone, toe to toe. "But if you don't find it in that great big heart of yours to let me down, I'm going to piss all over you. How about it? Do you have knowledge of that?"

She hated the twitch of slow pleasure that sparked up like a struck match in her belly, when she felt Naraku lower his head and kiss her throat. "Mmmm… later." he murmured in her taunt neck and threw her away from him.

"Ugh! You're fucking sick!" Rin swore with a grimace.

"You have no idea." the doctor countered with surprising loathing in his voice.

Luckily, Rin caught herself on her feet and made a beeline for the nearest door, assuming it was most likely a bathroom. Looking back over her shoulder to make sure the beast wasn't following her, Rin was nearly dazed at the sight of Naraku, kneeling, naked, upon the rumpled bed, his weird eyes devouring her in a million hungry ways. Kagome was right; he was incredibly delicious in an evil and forbidden way. But something else caught her eyes as she disappeared into the chill of the sparse bathroom. Her shivering now had little to do with the temperature.

Rin had seen the needle tracks down Naraku's left inner arm.


	4. Chapter 4

Rin found herself staring at the minute details of her hands as they clutched hard to the clinical coldness of the white sink before her. Her stomach still felt strange but it was calm for now; Rin should have known Onigumo would have acted a physician even as he was also a torturer and apparently, a junkie. Damn her, her thoughts kept circling back around to that! Maybe she had seen wrong – there were shadows and neon reflections after all. Rin continued to look down at her hands and avoid the mirror before her.

She hated Onigumo for his cruelty and his God complex, but fuck – there had to be more to the man than he let on if he truly was destroying himself one syringe at a time. Swishing out her dry mouth, Rin caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror. She looked haggard, the harsh mercury-vapor light filtering through the old warbled privacy glass threw dark, hungry shadows under her eyes even as the watery fingers of pre-dawn light began to inject a blue cast to her pale skin. Never mind the horrific trails of eye make-up winding feline streaks down her cheeks. Rin let a puff of air out of her lungs that would have been a laugh any other time.

"Just think, those Goth girls spend hours trying to accomplish this." Rin mumbled through a hoarse throat at her reflection. She had been screaming a bit the last 12 hours, she guessed.

There was a very expensive wrist watch on a glass slab below the mirror; dawn was coming on hard. When harsh, bright-white daylight illuminated Rin and (oh god) last night's apparently drunken lay, what was she going to say? Somewhere, her healer's mind begged her to try to get Onigumo to give up his wicked habit, because they both knew exactly where it would take him. Rin may have despised him, well – at least didn't like him much at all, but she did not want him dead. The woman hiding under the self-righteous cloak of healer and nurse wondered at a deeper cause and perhaps a deeper, costlier cure. Addiction was a slippery beast that often bit its handlers as well as its exterminators. Rin could see Onigumo as monster, naked, bestial – kneeling with his punctured arms out to her, a myriad of insectile limbs, slimy translucent tentacles sprouting from his gorgeous body and pumping poison through twisted veins, beaconing to her, calling her to subsume, to sublimate, to ignore…to mind her own fucking business…

Speaking of business… the toilet seat was absolutely fucking frigid this morning in a stranger's home.

At least it was clean – the man was a doctor, after all – thank the Kami for small favors.

What was she going to do? Rin pissed and thought, and then after a while she only thought. She cursed the small but growing spore of desire for the beast on the other side of that door. Once she allowed her eyes to see it, yes – Onigumo was beautiful in a dark way and he was even more so, now that he had laced that beauty with certain doom. Rin knew she was a sucker for a wounded bird; her foster father had always tried to break her of that habit, even when he himself was injured or sick. She just couldn't help herself; it was who Rin Taisho was. She also couldn't help but feel the dull licking flames of anger. What reason could such a perfect – at least in his own eyes – being have for slowly destroying himself from the inside out?

"Suck it up, already!" Rin swore to both herself and her mental Onigumo.

Time to shit or get off the pot, Rin snorted out to herself silently and washing her cold hands, forgot all about her messy face and opened the door.

Onigumo was lying down; his long back to her, apparently unconcerned that she might come out of the bathroom with a razor to slit his throat for his abduction and questionable seduction. Long, waving hair fanned down almost to his ass, thankfully covered by the sheet. Rin was nothing if she was not curious and so repeating the manta in her head over and over, "There must be a reason...", she crawled slowly back into the wide yet Spartan bed with her enemy.

Naraku heard the old bleached floorboards squeak and ride as Rin walked softly across them towards him. He would have guessed she'd have bolted out the door in self-loathing and absolute fury; he was surprised and the tiniest bit annoyed that she instead chose to stay and collect. Very well; he had given her the chance to deny him. Her next words were like ice water down his spine. He had, for the moment forgotten Rin had both eyes and mind to see him and that she was also a highly trained professional.

"Onigumo… what reason could you have to do that to yourself?" Rin asked with as little inflection to her voice as she could manage. She wasn't trying to confront him – yet, she was… it was a very slippery place between them.

He kept his back to her for a long moment and said nothing. Just as she was opening her mouth to ask again, his deep rasping voice filled the vast chasm of uncomfortable silence between them.

"Taisho, my back itches – scratch it for me.", Naraku's dead voice commanded.

Rin was momentarily confused by this change in subject – was he going to just pretend she'd said nothing at all? There wasn't any harm in it and if he did anything to piss her off, she could just gouge her nails into his flesh and say fuck-all to his problems. Nice and simple!

"Move your hair, your highness." Rin muttered, scooting close enough to do as she was asked.

Naraku twisted himself around to gather the long, heavy mass in one pale hand and twisting it with a bored complexity born of long habit drew himself open to her wide, shocked eyes.

The scar was horrifying and worst of all, it was very deep. The twisting pink and white striations of gristle-like scar tissue began in the center of the physician's broad back and the crater appeared nearly large enough to rest her head in the alien-like depression that was formed. Fingers of tell-tale alligator skin markings splayed out like the legs of a spider from the main wound; old healed skin-graft donor sites; Rin would know them anywhere. It was a bitter fact that however perfect the rest of Naraku Onigumo's body might appear, he was in truth hideously disfigured. She couldn't bring herself to touch even the border of normal intact skin, though still abnormally pink at the edge of the wound.

Suddenly, Rin knew. She understood.

"You don't know and you don't understand. You think you do. And before you get all high and mighty about what you think is heroin in my veins, you may calm yourself. I am after all, a doctor. Do you think anyone's going to question a doctor about his heavy use of narcotics during patient care?" Naraku spoke to the wall, laying stone-still and exposed.

"I can assume you learned the sequelae to extensive, severe burns, Taisho." Naraku quietly patronized with an unseen bitter smile.

"Chronic pain among other things. Onigumo – what… did that to you?" Rin intoned in a daze. Her hand hovered over the gnarled, ruined flesh and she wanted to touch him, to try to comfort him but just couldn't move. Instinctively, like she was beholding a leper, Rin found her sudden squeamishness overwhelming. No – she was a professional and this was someone in pain! Far more pain then she could ever imagine… he was right, of course. She couldn't truly understand.

"Lye."

The end of the word transformed into a hiss as Rin set her hand down finally on Naraku's ruined back as he spoke. Rin's brows knitted together momentarily at that one leaden word. The worst possible kind of chemical burn, lye turned flesh into soap, which sloughed off, never to be healed – only to be covered, in this case with unsuccessful skin grafts. The scarring was tremendous. Rin could not believe Onigumo had survived it.

The sensation was strange for them both. The odd textures and firm yet warm ridges of Naraku's scar made her palm tingle and she slowly traced the alien world of his skin with her fingers. Naraku had never let anyone touch the monstrosity upon his back in the long years since he'd last suffered the Silvadene and the bandages. The extremely sensitive scar tissue made every tiny, feather-light stroke upon his back burn with delicious fire and he quickly lost himself in the jolts of pleasure each one shot through his exposed body.

Once she'd gotten over her initial revulsion, Rin found the tortured flash fascinating. A small voice in the back of her mind scolded her that only a medical professional was sick enough to be fascinated by a rare and extreme wound. She gave that little voice the mental finger and noticed Onigumo's tense shoulders and his panting breaths. Was she now the tormentor of this beast of a man? Perhaps that's what he needs, Rin wondered at herself and wondered at what she might do if the great and powerful Onigumo was now at her mercy. She kept thinking, "Perhaps that's what he needs…" and suddenly Rin Taisho felt the strangest mix of need and frustration, anger and desire to heal all twisted up into a tight skein within her.

She leaned deftly over Naraku's shoulder and looked at his face. He had his nightmare-colored eyes held closed against her and the look of abject self-loathing harrowed his pale face, making him look like a devil sick of sin. Rin then noticed that rather than suffering her petting with anger, the man was hard as a stone, the full head of his arousal poking hungrily from under the sheet at his waist. He appeared to loathe himself utterly for such pleasure and testing her theory, Rin drug her nails softly down the center of the vile mark, immediately earning her a hiss from his lips and throb from his cock.

Leaning back on her arm, Rin switched hands momentarily. Naraku twitched under her tender ministrations with immaculate control. He never told her to stop, never spoke a word to her and he never moved outright. He was hiding himself away, denying her his submission and acceptance. It was always a battle with this man; Rin sighed heavily and then stubbornly decided she was going to win this battle, even if it meant that she ultimately lost the war.

Scooting closer, Rin decided to push Naraku off the edge he was clinging to, however bravely. She brought her face close to his ruined back and after a moment's hesitation, licked him. The surprised and somewhat strangled cry that answered was perfect. How could he not understand that such disfigurement was not an automatic rejection from the rest of humanity? Was this the reason he tried to play God and also why he sought to destroy himself with drugs? She'd had worse patients… Rin mused and tasted him again.

A cold line of taboo drilled at her mind: She had never done - could not contemplate ever doing such things with a patient.

Naraku finally moaned through his closed lips and Rin decided to put the questions of her motives and her feelings away for another time. He was resisting and she was just paying this jerk back in kind, wasn't she? She continued to slowly tongue Naraku's hypersensitive flesh and spooned her body flush with his. She could feel the urge to move, to resist, to desist hard within him and yet he did nothing. Running her hand over the deceptive perfection of his hip, Rin found his straining cock was in easy reach. When her fingers meet the hot flesh, Naraku pushed back against her suddenly – she almost bit her tongue.

"If you move, I will stop. You will hold still Naraku Onigumo.", Rin made sure to speak loud enough for him to hear her from her position at his back.

He said nothing, but thrust himself slickly against her questing hand.

"After all, you deserve this." Rin whispered into his moist back.

She was surprised at the feel of him in her hand. Rin had some experience, sure, but not a lot. She'd seen longer, but probably not bigger. She stroked her hand up and down slowly in time with the strokes of her tongue across his wicked scar until his hips were jerking out a helplessly spastic rhythm. She vaguely saw him reach slowly for the bed's heavy iron above his unseeing eyes and Rin let him lead as she tongued Naraku's ugliness and took it within herself while he cried out with a snarl and submitted to her succor, a thick coating of his seed spurting out to cover her squeezing, stroking hand.

His breathing was still ragged as Naraku rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself up on his long forearms. He made a fist with one and watched his veins squirm just under the translucent pale surface.

He gave Rin a malefic glance then kissed her very hard, conquering her mouth with his tongue. She didn't even have time to join in before he was again glancing at his abused arm.

"I'm surprised you didn't decide to try out your traction skills, Taisho." Naraku smirked through his dark brows at her where she lay, idly wiping her hand clean on the sheet. The prick, she thought – he could worry about his laundry later.

"We don't do traction in ICU – you want to play with weights and string, you go to Orthopedics." she countered sarcastically and got up to wash her hands.


	5. Chapter 5

She still hadn't found her clothes… that was the last thing Rin remembered when she scooted back into bed and tried to ignore the other person already sleeping beside her. Sleep claimed with all the gentleness of a Mack truck and she was out like a light.

The bedroom was full of twilit pink and orange light when she turned over and opened her eyes. Soft creepy things were twitching over her shoulder and Rin nearly freaked out until she realized it was only rouge strands of Onigumo's long hair waving in the ceiling fan's wake. His sleeping face was turned into her shoulder, the bruise colors to his eyelids a strange contrast to his pale face. She wished her damn eyelashes were that long, if he got a personality transplant, Naraku Onigumo would have been the perfect hunk of man for her, and Rin rolled her eyes at her own wit with a soft snort.

Milking the opportunity to study the Good Doctor Onigumo while he was blissfully unaware, Rin marveled at how thin he was – not necessarily bony, but wiry, whip-like. _Junkies are always thin_ her mind helpfully supplied and Rin tasted bitter bile at the back of her throat, angrily pushing that voice away with grinding teeth. Long, tall and imposing even in sleep, she mused. She couldn't see Naraku's marred back but Rin knew it was still there, queering his perfection for the rest of his days. Her cheeks blazed at the reminder of the taste of dark physician's brutalized flesh – she'd never be able to look at him again without thinking of that act.

"As a known enemy…" Rin started humming to herself and added a few notes of the rather ingenious bass line that attended the words. She would have laughed if anyone but the man next to her had mimed strumming those same notes on some phantom bass.

"Nice air guitar, Onigumo. Get some lessons." Rin barked with a crooked smile on her sloppy face.

"Who do you think taught little Kagura how to play?" was his quietly superior reply.

"Oh my, a gentleman and a scholar! Is there anything you can't do?" she snarked back, hands between her knees. Rin noticed there were fresh abrasions on them both; must have been when she passed out at the bar.

"Stand your screeching voice in my ear." Onigumo replied quickly, keeping his eyes shut. Rin rolled her eyes at him with a very heart-felt hand gesture telling the man what he could do with himself and then stopped mid-bird. He was sweating. It's wasn't hot. They had only slept under a sheet all day long. Rin was lying close enough to the physician to have felt him radiate heat if he were feverish. But he was cold and he was sweating. Naraku was beginning to fiend.

Rin propped her arms on her knees and put her head down upon them with a deep breath. That's why she'd remembered that song…

There was nothing to do, nothing she could do and knowing that pissed her off in big way, both as a woman and as a nurse. Rin Taisho hated that powerless observer role! Might as well do something constructive, she figured. Time to find her clothes and her bag! She knew it had a toothbrush in it. Nurses carry toothbrushes; long shifts and quick lunches make them a pleasant necessity – plus they drink lots of coffee. Patients with nausea – coffee breath: you do the math. Rin idly switched gears to think of anything else other than the nightmare lying next to her.

Obviously he felt well enough to lean out of bed and slap her hard on the ass when she got up.

"I'm going to make you pay for that, asshole." she smiled back with menace, secretly relieved.

"Don't lie to me, girl." Naraku dismissed with a bored wave of his red hand.

"Go shoot up, you're acting like a little bitch." she spat back and slammed the bedroom door on her way out. Inside herself Rin was appalled at how easy it had been to throw Naraku's weakness in his face.

She could hear his laughter through the door and it was a little sickening.

_Never mind him_, her mind patted gently. _Get your shit together and then you can feed us, _it smoothed over in her head. Padding naked through the cavernous decay Onigumo called home, Rin found her bag by the door. She found the remains of her dress and underwear on the couch; damn doctor – he just cut her clothes off with trauma shears! That dress was brand… fucking… new! Great. Well, the monster now owed her clothes!

She noticed a sparse kitchen with way too many sharp knives hanging from magnetic bars, gleaming like hungry teeth in the fading light. She could drink out of the bathroom sink, thank you very much. There was no way on Earth she was going into Onigumo's kitchen. Not while he was alive.

She passed a gorgeous Rickenbacker bass guitar on a stand and stuck her tongue out at it.

She passed a small black box on the heavy wood table next to the couch and stopped. Rin knew what was in there but she needed to look. She needed to be sure. Lifting the lid, Rin Taisho couldn't help the professional voice listing the litany of names, both brand and generic of the vials she found within: Sublimaze, fentanyl – Demerol, merperidine – Morphine, the grandfather of them all. There was a small one at the bottom. Rin squinted her eyes to read the label: Nimbex. That name meant nothing to her, but the generic did: cisatracurium. Curare… the paralytic agent, combined with the narcotics…

"Oh my god…" she whispered and dropped the small vial like it was poison. It bounced against the sterile insulin syringes and hit the wooden floor with small sloshing sound.

"Relax…" a slick oily voice echoed against her ear and Rin instinctively backed into the large shivering body behind her. "If I was going to kill myself, I would have done it by now. That vial is very old. You didn't look at the expiration date, Taisho? How unprofessional of you." Naraku purred as he pulled her hard into him with an arm around her neck. His skin was slimy from sweat and a fine tremor vibrated along the arm held tight around her neck.

"I didn't look – I don't work in surgery." she spoke out of reflex, not really thinking. Rin's mind still conjured up visions of Onigumo's black despair. That such a seemingly egotistical and proud being was so rotten to the core with self-hatred and despair was nearly unthinkable in her mind. She would never joke about him to Kagome again; he was too fucking tragic.

"I'll thank you to let go of my works so I can shoot up and stop being a little bitch, Rin Taisho.", Naraku growled into her unhearing ear.

She didn't hear him and kept the box clutched tightly in a tight cold hand. When he let go of her neck and started peeling her fingers from the evil thing, Rin found her mind and roused it from shocked slumber.

"No!" she yelled back at the man behind her and threw the box across the room – narrowly missing the pristine guitar. Facing the looming physician with sudden determination – she would not watch him continue to destroy himself! – Rin never saw his left hand when it hit her.

"GIVE ME WHAT IS MINE!" Naraku screamed in her face with sudden desperate fury and threw her at the couch.

Rin was slightly dazed, her cheek and nose stung as she slid off the couch to plop flat on her butt onto the floor. The glass vial of Nimbex rolled against her fingers. It had expired four years ago. He was, of course right. Liquid death sloshed within its glass egg as she picked it up and fisted it. Naraku had taken two large strides, retrieved his kit and was inspecting the outside for damage when Rin lunged and leapt onto his scarred back with a scream. It wasn't her uncle's famous battle cry but was a very respectable scream, nonetheless. She wound her arms around the irate physician's neck and locked her legs about his waist. He was hard to keep hold of, still slick with cold sweat and Naraku did his best to ignore her angry trashing and continue his dread work.

Rin was furious the monster could still draw up an injection with an angry woman attempting to throw him off balance with her small angry mass.

So she loosened one hand and covered his eyes.

Naraku stopped moving. His heaving breaths belied the effort it was taking to bear them both up under her thrashing. Suddenly the world was calm.

"Taisho, I am holding an open syringe of Demerol. Even if I were to pretend not to know your weight, this dose would put you in respiratory arrest." Naraku spoke quietly and slowly as if to cataclysmically retarded child. "Respiratory arrest means ventilator. Ventilator means ICU. ICU means under the service of Doctor… Naraku… Onigumo!" he growled out with impressive menace. Rin was tempted to let go.

"If you do not let go, I may accidentally stick you and I cannot afford both our habits, Rin. Let me go." Naraku finished in a darkly quiet voice.

"I will not let you keep doing this, Onigumo! Naraku… please stop this madness." she begged angrily, tightening her grip on his waist.

"Let me go." Naraku repeated. "I will not ask again."

"No!"

Carefully Naraku put the cap back on his syringe and set it and the box on the nearby table. The half scream and half roar he then suddenly screamed could only be agony, Rin thought distantly as he ripped her arm from around his neck and then ripped her bodily from his back. Undeterred, Rin used her momentum to swing herself back around for roundhouse punch to his solar plexus, which Naraku easily blocked by turning sideways, grabbing her fist in his own and pushing her hard to end of it like a yo-yo. Losing her balance Rin fell hard onto her abraded knees with a hiss of both pain and defeat. A small crunching noise surprised them both and Rin cried out in sharp pain as the vial of Nimbex broke in her hand and sliced her palm.

Naraku blinked his maroon eyes in surprise and the disbelief, opening her clutching hand as clear liquid ran down her wrist, dripping to the floor.

"What do you have in your hand, Rin?" he breathlessly rasped out at her.

"Liquid death, dead in that vial. I used it to pad my fist." Rin breathed out and fatefully waited for the paralysis to begin.

"What – you couldn't find a lighter?" he raised an eyebrow at her and drug the naked, shivering woman to her unsteady feet. Quickly, Naraku drug her into the bathroom and pushed her into the tub. Bright florescent light blared in the small room as the doctor lit the darkness.

"Kneel in the tub and stick your hand under the faucet." Naraku commanded in his coldest, most clinical physician's voice.

"What? Why?" Rin narrowed her eyes in instinctive stubbornness.

"To get the liquid death off your hand and out of your blood stream, or do you like the idea of my intubating you in my bathroom? I know I'll enjoy It.", Naraku glared with a sick leer and turned on the cold water full-blast.

"Turn your hand so the glass washes off. Stay this way for five minutes. If you feel you are having respiratory distress, scream." Naraku spoke dryly over her shoulder as he pulled Rin into position under the water.

"You're such an asshole, you know that, Naraku?" Rin sneered up at the towering doctor washing his hands in the sink.

"You love it. If you move from there in the space of five minutes, I will turn on the shower and you may enjoy it that way for 15 minutes.", Naraku bit out right back at her and left, closing the door behind him.

She'd picked out most of the glass by the time he came back and for once, she was glad he was right about everything – the vial had been too old to harm her other than by giving her a pretty decent laceration on her palm. Naraku had draped a towel around his waist, Pharaoh-style and lifting her from the frigid tub, set her on his lap. A sterile instrument kit lay on the counter and he quickly picked the last stubborn shards out of her hand with tweesers, leaning over her shoulder to see. Weirdly intimate, neither spoke as the doctor put steri-strips on the wound. He hung over her shoulder a moment more than necessary and she almost said something.

Rin noticed that his hands didn't shake once. Pain bloomed hot in her gut.

"Can I trust you not put that wound in the water? You do still practice basic wound care on the ICU?" Naraku quietly asked the small woman perched on his lap, but his words lacked their usual sarcasm, instead he sounded calculating.

"Yes.", Rin distantly replied without really thinking. She wanted to simply sit where she was, a simple intimate act without complications or expectations. She felt warm hands on her arms, standing her up, however unwillingly. Rin felt Naraku's nose brush her ear.

"Your hair smells like cigarettes, scotch and sex." he growled.

Oh Kami, Rin wanted to hear him breathe "sex" about a thousand more times in her ear… and hated herself for it, but… the hate was becoming a knee-jerk reaction now. She didn't really mean it, so much…

~*~

Rin stretched out in the tub as she watched Naraku rinse the soap from his tangled mane. Oh lord, he was even better when wet! Rin drooled mentally and then shook her head to clear it. It had to be the steamy heat getting to her! This same gorgeous creature had struck her when she tried to stop him from shooting up.

Yeah – that had been a very stupid move on her part. Was it him or was it the fiending for narcotics that had done that? Rin wish she knew – but it made her even more determined to try and save Naraku from himself. She'd done foolhardy things before in the name of compassion, like that time she'd climbed that cliff to get a rare plant for her Father's oldest friend as a gift and nearly broken her fool neck in the process. Rin mused on her own prickly self and was snapped out of her pleasant, heat-induced reverie when Naraku began talking.

"This is what started it.", he spoke to anyone but her.

She wanted him to continue so Rin said nothing.

"You'll never know what pain is until you put your burned flesh under hot water. You know that burn victims are… medicated… before debridement.", his face twisted with remembered pain and hate as Naraku paused, his red eyes seeing the past or nothing at all.

"Debridement is a fucking sick joke made up by sadists far worse than me. Scraping the non-viable skin and tissue from your raw tortured body, that's what it really means in practice. In the beginning, I only shot up before dressing changes and baths…" self-loathing and anger darkened his already deep voice.

Turning back around, Naraku retreated back within himself, rinsing the remainder of his white body with the cleansing water.

"The water's getting cold. Move your ass if you're getting in here." Rin barked when the shower was turned off.

"I'm nearly positive the large lever that turns on the wall there can fix that." Naraku narrowed his eyes at her and pointed to the faucet.

Rin gave him a shitty look and turned the hot water on after she flipped the drain.

"It's a modern fucking miracle, Taisho!" Naraku enthused falsely and stepped into the tub.

When he dropped to his knees, Rin stopped him from lowering completely within the water. His height was such a convenient thing! Time for some payback… her hand stung still.

She avoided his narrowed eyes completely, the red irises swallowing the pin-pint pupils with evil light, and instead quickly ran her wet, hot hands down his newly dried stomach. The goose-bumps Rin left in her wake were incredibly satisfying. She merely had to spread her knees and duck her head a bit to get him in her mouth. A flock of birds flew past the light in her peripheral vision as Naraku tossed his wet hair back and thrust his rapidly hardening cock in and out of her willing mouth.

Fellatio was one of Rin's secret sexual thrills. She'd much rather blow a guy than actually have to get personal and fuck him, especially if it was just for a quick and dirty fling. She'd had the luck to be broken to act by a guy with a giant cock and so everyone else came easy.

Rin snorted her cheesy wit around the meat in her mouth, which Naraku was far beyond noticing. When she felt him twitch in her mouth and felt his stomach begin to flex and writhe with oncoming orgasm, Rin pulled back completely and wiped her mouth.

She could hear Naraku grinding his teeth in pent-up agony and after a long moment, she let him guide himself back within her gag-less depths. A quick minute later and she was also fondling his heavy sac to make the pain just that much sweeter. He was nearly there again, snarling moans echoing loudly off the tiled walls - so Rin stopped again, turning her head when the frustrated physician tried to pull her back onto his spit-slick cock by her hair.

"Do you know how painful that is, you crazy whore?" Naraku swore through clenched teeth.

Rin gave him a hard stare. "It can't be worse than debridement, now can it? You've been thoroughly medicated, now suffer." she spat out with more vehemence than she expected.

Naraku lifted his hand from her hair and instead cupped her chin, a dead-cold fire burning in his cruel eyes that had Rin's name written all over it. He made no move to force her back upon his still throbbing flesh but when she lowered her head again, he guided her to her place as Rin engulfed him in pleasure and pain once more.

She denied him three more times before she let him come, nearly screaming and bucking so hard against her face, Rin thought the beast would throw her off of him in his seizing, searing release. When his breathing evened out and Naraku returned from the dark side of the moon, he leaned heavily against her in the large clawed tub.

"You got your hand wet, Taisho." Naraku scolded half-heartedly in a sullen way.

"Boy that's too bad, next time I'll be more careful, Doctor."


	6. Chapter 6

"Well this is comfortable. Why did you cut me out of my clothes in the first place?", Rin groused, pulling at a shirt long enough to be a dress. Which was exactly what it was, because Naraku had nothing else she could wear – at least it wasn't a white shirt, she fumed.

Even though she was covered adequately; the shirt touched her knees, Rin still felt amazingly exposed. Not having underwear on did that to a person. The knee-high black boots were like insult to injury. Rin found she unconsciously tugged the tail of the shirt under her ass every time she sat down and then neurotic about how high the damn thing rode when she did sit, the irritated woman popped back up off the couch to pace the floor once more.

"My coat is over there – put it on and stop pacing. Your heels are giving me a headache.", Onigumo snarled at her once from his closet.

"Oh really? Well, they make drugs for that, you sick fuck.", she muttered to herself and then she wailed back, "Then why the hell did you cut off my clothes, Naraku?"

She heard a door slam as she found the long black coat. Rin had put an arm in one of the voluminous sleeves when she was turned around by a hard hand on her shoulder.

Naraku glared down at her, lines of aggravation etched along his aquiline nose and was about to yell something, when instead he started laughing at her. It was an ugly, malevolent laugh and Rin found she wanted to punch him more than she wanted to know what was so fucking funny!

He let go of her and walked back from whence he came. A moment later, the lanky physician was back before her with a very familiar dark purple object hung over his arm.

"Take it off.", he leered.

Rin looked hard at the purple thing on his arm and her stomach fell to the floor.

"Oh no. No fucking way. I'm not wearing that.", Rin refused outright – with feeling.

"The overcoat is too long; you look like a ridiculous child cross-dresser."

"I am not going to wear that lab coat. I'd rather go nude.", Rin replied and crossed her arms in stubborn finality.

She was not going to cover herself in something so blatantly belonging to the sadistic physician Dr. Onigumo. It just wasn't a line she could cross; the professional roles that were cast around them both were separate entities on many levels – she refused to mingle the gorgeously doomed and tragic Naraku with the malefic, egomaniacal butcher Dr. Onigumo…

…even if they were the same person.

Like all those who lived two lives, Rin had built heavy barriers against her personal and professional lives and these were not to be torn asunder by her inconvenient need to go out in public properly clothed.

Naraku looked hard at her and in one smooth motion had tossed his lab coat on the floor and grabbed the lapel of his borrowed shirt. Rin had time to take a half a breath and then buttons were flying as Naraku ripped the front on the shirt open with a wicked smile.

"That was your shirt, you idiot!", Rin spat at him and twisted out of Naraku's grasp.

He laughed at her again and stalked into the nearby kitchen. Grabbing a long sharp knife from its bar, the beast hefted it at her with a nimble spin, "Would you rather eat in, then?" he cocked an eyebrow at her nakedness and licked his thin lips in a thoroughly obscene way.

"Give me another shirt.", was her counter offer.

~*~

Rin hated ryokan-style food. She hated the formality of it, she hated the tortured attention to detail, every last piece of food in its right place. And given her present state of undress, she really hated sitting on the floor. Rin squirmed upon her bent legs, hoping the stupid shirt was riding up anywhere.

She'd never been much for Middle-Eastern food either and the dark opium den ambiance was disconcerting, no matter how hungry she was. The pierced brass lantern above them threw weird colored light over everything and some kind of weird, foreign-sounding music droned from somewhere and everywhere. Everywhere she looked seemed covered with squirming abstract patterns that snared her eyes in torturous optical illusions. Thankfully, her stomach would occasionally growl and snap her eyes back to the present.

Her partner in this dining adventure was lounging against the dark red wall behind him. Naraku ignored her for the most part, inwardly enjoying the small woman's discomfort very much. Always just this side of embarrassed, a rosy tint coated Rin's cheeks and her neck. She was easily tormented now that some armor had been stripped off. Resting his dark head on one long hand, Naraku concentrated on his thoughts and continued to stare just over Rin's head.

"Are you uncomfortable, Taisho? Why don't you just stretch out and enjoy yourself?", Naraku's smoky voice poked at her.

"Bet you'd like that show, wouldn't you?", Rin hissed back angrily and shifted on her numbing heels again. "Bastard."

"I'd like that show very much, little girl.", he leaned forward over the low table; under the fuming light of the lamp Naraku's face was a twisted mask of leering monstrosity. He quickly resumed his lounging. "I thought you said you were hungry."

Rin turned her face away and looked somewhere else in frustrated irritation. She _was_ hungry. He'd ordered them some sort of unintelligible dish, she'd never heard of the slurring, clipped names he'd effortlessly tossed at the bland waiter. Rin really hoped it was nothing… unnatural. Letting her eyes swivel back to her tormentor, Rin kept one eye on Naraku as she toyed with a small wrought silver cup. The coffee-ish substance within tasted like some kind of weird spice and she hated that it was so sweet; a smile flew quickly across her lips at the common memory of telling Kagome she liked her coffee just as she liked her men – white and bitter.

Hey… that wasn't very funny… Rin frowned at herself. Luckily she didn't have to dwell on it long as the food then arrived.

Rin stared at the large plate of strange meat in front of Naraku. He'd ordered something for him… but not for her. The sneaky son-of-a-bitch…

Naraku grinned at her and made a rather enjoyable show of dipping one long white finger in the mingled blood and sauce then licking it clean. Rin let him gloat at her for as long as she could stand it.

"Enjoying yourself?"

"Very much. Would you like a taste?"

"What is it, first?", Rin wondered with trepidation. Her mind was supplying all kinds of horror-show possibilities. Knowing Onigumo, it could be stewed baby.

"Come over here and find out.", Naraku challenged and twisting his long body, gesturing elegantly to the spot between his spread legs.

Rin swallowed hard. She almost wished he was being more of dick… it was easier to be disgusted, easier to resist. Rin blew a heavy breath out her nose; she was hungry and whatever that was on the large brass plate smelled _heavenly_. Looking around her, she saw no servers by which to order anything else; they were ensconced along a dark corner, far from the kitchens it seemed. Just fucking lovely, she ground out silently.

Standing cautiously, Rin smoothed her makeshift dress behind her ass. She could tell the indigo linen was wrinkled where she'd sat upon it, and adjusting the thin studded belt Naraku had dug up from the depths of his closet back around her waist, Rin stepped carefully around the low table, and managed not to bare her ass in the process. The maneuver did cause her to notice her bare nipples were beginning to chafe on the shirt, maybe she could slip a hand in to rub them when the physician wasn't looking…

Oh, that was knee-slapper, wasn't it? For the four hundredth time, Rin wondered angrily why Onigumo had cut…her…damn… clothes… off!

She tried to squeeze herself next to the large man, but as she was half-way to the floor, Naraku stopped her and pulled her into his lap. Rin banged her knees on the low table, startling when she felt his hand under her ass, making the exotic dishes and tableware clank and shiver in response.

"Don't make a scene, little Rin. You do and we leave without finishing our meal.", Naraku moaned in her ear with hungry threat. She could feel him smile against the side of her neck – Rin wished she'd not put that side of her hair up, of yes she did! - then it was his teeth she felt grazing her skin, his mostly subdued hair brushing the open collar of her borrowed shirt. _Oh god… concentrate on the fact that you're hungry, Rin_… she closed her eyes momentarily and tried to ignore what was being done to her neck, her throat, her shoulder… swallowing hard…

"I am hungry, remember.", she tried to sound stern but the breathy edge Rin heard in her voice really gave her away – she knew it did and wanted to scream in Naraku's leering face. She decided to ignore it and him utterly. "What is that we're eating?", she asked in a casual way, trying to look interested for conversation's sake. The desire for conversation was nowhere to be seen in Naraku's dark smoldering eyes. Rin tried to look anywhere but at them and failed miserably.

"Lamb." Naraku replied slowly, savoring the word and its implications on his tongue as he picked up a piece in his long fingers and offered it to her over the charger.

The dark sauce looked like blood dripping off his spidery fingers and that drew Rin's eyes to the misty purple veins just visible through the white flesh of Naraku's exposed wrist. Strangely, that decided her – she was the one with power here, wasn't she?

Rin smiled a wicked smile of her own and quickly leaned forward to mouth Naraku's offered treat. Taking the meat deftly, she resisted the urge to bite the hand that fed her and instead sucked greedily on the digits between her lips.

Chewing cautiously Rin had to admit – it was delicious and very rare. She usually liked her food more cooked but it was a minor thing, really. Naraku's expression was the perfect garnish; he looked the tiniest bit disappointed for a split-second. Power between them had shifted again.

Of course, leaning over the table made the shirt ride over her body in a raw way, damn it…

Naraku gestured to her silently to help herself after she had finished the first piece and when she made to pick up a fork, he growled at her. "No."

"Yes.", she smiled cannily from up under her neat brows.

Naraku slowly ran his fingers through his high ponytail in unheeded habit and then leaned slowly into her. Rin felt a cool hand under her hair, curling around the back of her neck, another slithered into her lap. Bringing her close to his lips, Naraku purred into her small, very pink ear.

"Do you know what your fingers have done to me, girl? Think about the delicious… pleasure… it gives me to see you suck the bloody liquor from them with those talented lips of yours…", he nearly moaned into her mind, the perfect Serpent to her Eve.

Rin was so caught up in the haze of his smooth, rich voice she didn't notice Naraku's fingers rubbing her inner thigh until he moved high enough to brush the short well-trimmed hair to be found above it. She couldn't stifle the small gasp the surprise invasion caused her and tried to cover the sudden wave of hot desire by quickly putting a piece of lamb in her mouth.

Naraku ignored what his hand was doing and continued to whisper sin into her shivering ear as Rin slowly, deliberately ate. She took her time and tried to keep her charms well hidden from his long, impossibly warm… wet… fingers. Occasionally, she would turn her face towards him and make a subdued but deliberate show of licking the lamb's juices from her nimble fingers, trying to give as good as she was getting. Naraku would pull away from her ear then and watch with his smoldering maroon eyes, all while demonstrating just which one of them was in charge within her slippery depths.

If anyone paid any attention to them at all, Rin and her tormentor appeared to be enjoying a romantic dinner and intimate conversation. Perhaps they would have noticed her cheeks were flushed but the watcher might chalk that up to spicy food or perhaps wine with the meal. They would not have thought that she was doing her best not to come screaming as Naraku mercilessly teased her traitorous body, rubbing, sliding, and slipping against her.

When Rin got to last couple pieces, she offered one to try to shut him up – because if Naraku continued to tell her what he was planning on doing to her tonight, she was going to go out of her fucking mind! He shook his dark head at her and refused silently. Rin wasn't sure any more who was seducing who, only that she needed to get out of this situation before she lost total control of herself in front of the entire cafe's clientele. His ministrations were never quite enough for her come completely and it wasn't enough! She needed more... craved it...

When the ornate hammered design reveled itself for dearth of food upon the plate's surface, Rin took a deep, shaky breath to try her thick voice.

"Do you feel like dessert?" she challenged Naraku, who withdrew his fingers from their moist play, and touching those fingertips to the remnant of dark bloody sauce, proceeded to lick them clean, one by one, his eyes hard upon her, unblinking.

He smiled at her control and vowed to break it before dawn.

"I want to be inside of you.", Naraku growled throatily once more into Rin's ear as the well-fed woman wiped her hand and mouth on a thick napkin. The thought of how wet she was burned his calculating mind. Naraku knew she'd curse him the entire long, uncomfortable walk back to his lair.

"Get up, Taisho – we're done here." He smiled wickedly.

~*~

They walked in a strange silence. Naraku's loping strides made Rin have to do her uber-fast nurse's walk to keep up – which made her have to be less mindful of the vagaries of her clothing as she stalked along side him; not too close and not necessarily far away.

Every time her legs brushed together a certain way, a jolt of fire shot down to her toes and burned in her belly. It made her want to kick Onigumo in the fucking shin. She should have known her current misery was carefully laid by his wicked mind. Damn him, she should have known!

Naraku looked into the middle distance and ignored her.

Once, as they passed a bright façade, his dark eyes flickered above her head, observed and then returned to the middle ground. Rin never would have guessed he lived this close to the hospital; the stench of urban decay underlay the new, somewhat trendy stores, bars and café's they passed. Everything around her was seemingly ancient and falling apart, eaten within by the rot of time, no matter how fresh and bright the paint above. It was not uncommon see American Civil War era relics being used next to slick modern conveniences in this city, its Gothic charm suited the small hidden love for the old and the dead within her, if only Rin would admit such to herself.

Naraku shrugged his shoulders within the great dark wings of his coat and Rin was reminded of the scar on his back. She would have been fine, but then he pulled his hair out of confinement and flipped it hard over his head and back again. Pain bloomed over his face and Rin tripped over her feet, stumbling into him, struck by his spoiled beauty.

Instead of giving her a tongue-lashing for her trespass, Naraku only looked at her with narrowed eyes.

The next thing Rin knew she was being dragged into the darkness between close-set, ancient buildings. The slimy bricks met her injured hand, cold and hard, as her chest was pressed against the wall by another's heavy body. Naraku attacked quickly her from behind, both his hands on her wet pussy, pushing her hard back into his caged erection with a wordless snarl. When she hissed at the pain in her hand, he drug her further from the light and deeper into the alley. A twisted piece of wrought iron jutted from the crumbling wall before her and Rin grabbed it as they passed, instinctively looking for a place to steady herself before she lost her mind utterly. It stretched out in his iron grip.

He barked a guttural laugh at her puny resistance and leaned over her, shoving his face in her hair and his hand back between her legs. When she lost control of a low, shuddering moan, Naraku ripped the thin leather belt she'd borrowed from him and pulled it hard into her open mouth like a bit.

"If wishes were horses, than beggars would ride." , he rasped heavily in her ear.

Rin was glad of the gag; it kept her from begging Naraku Onigumo to fuck her.

Gripping the ends in one hand, Naraku bent her roughly over the ancient hitching post before them, pushed the loose, wrinkled linen shirt over Rin's ass and in a short, hot moment, had her impaled upon his thick cock with a hard quick snarl. His height pushed her onto her toes as Naraku leaned back to get as much of himself within her as he could, pulling the panting woman's head back with her make-shift rein. She wanted to scream obscenities at the monster behind her, she wanted to urge him on, to pour his agony into her, to fill her up. She wanted to spit in his face - she didn't know what she wanted!

The sound of their brutal fucking echoed off the buildings, the wet sounds of flesh smacking flesh making Rin acutely aware of their exposure, the exhibitionist within her wishing for an audience to bear witness to her shameful display. She felt Naraku lean over her bent-back body and felt his fingers run up the front of her filched shirt to rub her sore nipples. Leaning forward forced him painfully deep within her but the pain was just what she wanted, needed. Her strangled cries were tiny and unstoppable as Rin rode every inch Naraku rammed hard within her. She bit the leather in her mouth, grateful for her enforced silence.

She wanted a witness so badly, so Rin turned her head carefully over her shoulder to peek. Naraku's white face was rictus of open-mouthed pleasure and noticing her watching him, he bared his teeth at her with silent venom and fucked her harder. It was all she could stand and Rin found her body quickly clamping down in spastic transcendence, throwing herself out like a torn flag in a storm. A moment later, she came again, as Naraku let go of the belt, fisted her hair instead and came hard within her. She could feel his seed running out of her with each jerking stroke and loved it - the filthiness so fitting to their twisted relationship in this dank alley. His rasping breath was the only sound until she heard a zipper. Rin still held fast to the iron before her and was surprised by the sweaty white hands that suddenly covered hers, peeling her fingers of their death-grip.

When she let herself back down on to her shaking legs, Naraku met her wide eyes with a cold smirk.

"It's three more blocks to my home; do you think you'll be able make it without something embarrassing happening, little Rin?"

When she realized what he was referring to, her cheeks flamed in anger and mortification. _Wait a minute – you're a professional problem-solver, Rin Taisho – think! What could you used to plug the hole?_

"Turn around, asshole. I'll just be a second.", Rin grinned her most shit-eating grin and fished around for the small zipper pocket in her bag.

~*~

Rin swore to herself as she walked smugly next to the silent Naraku: if she got anything out this mess, she was getting some new underwear.


	7. Chapter 7

_What was she doing here still…?_ Rin wondered to herself as she stretched. Under her cold body, the floorboards leached her body heat from their dry dead centuries. Everything around her was ancient, it seemed and falling slowly apart. The drama of her little escapades these past couple of days seemed nothing in the long, grand scheme of things, so why should any of it matter? Rin lie on the living room floor while her enemy slept and let her soul reach out, creep out along the floor, fingers of awareness tickling the table, the guitar, the empty glass in the darkness. She had gotten out of bed to try to think. Rin didn't want to; her mind kept running the taste of Naraku's marred skin over and over; the projector continuing to turn the tangled mass of celluloid once the reel had run dry. Why couldn't she just quit remembering the taste of him in her mouth and just _think_!

_Why was she still here in this dark, strange nightmare? What – who – was she trying to save?_

Rin chewed her bottom lip and refused to believe that the weedy species of slowly twining feeling feeding on both her desire and desperation could be called love.

The early morning darkness was thick and grainy in her eyes and as Rin rolled sullenly over on her side, she noted absently the catalogue of sore calves, and a twinge of pain in her belly; raw corners at her small, sharp mouth, the remembered taste of wet leather. The hard use in the alley remembered made her softer, more languid. Rin smiled to herself when she remembered the look of naked desire in Naraku's eyes before he snatched her into the darkness; she was also a powerful addiction and somehow that idea made the sprawling naked woman suddenly very hot and wet.

The click of a needle and a hiss of dead air made her crane her neck around to the source of the noise. Rin followed the slow steps Naraku's long white feet as he walked around her and the strange hoarse prophet snarled out a rhythmic chant

_And the Earth died screaming while I lay dreaming_

_Well, the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming_

_The earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming_

_Dreaming of you…_

They watched each other narrowly; Naraku, draped in Tyrian purple silk, spread his long arms over the back of the couch, one leg balanced casually across the other – comfortable in his own cold white skin and Rin, worming her way naked upon the floor, her body chaffing at its narrow confines with boiling hunger. The weird voice capering between them in apocalyptic madness taunted and beaconed – Rin hated it instinctively. She could imagine a mad blind prophet tearing at his dirty scabs, gibbering at a leprous moon with blue-white larval eyes. Naraku looked hard at her, twitching the tips of his fingers in slow accompaniment.

"Onigumo – why are you a doctor?" Rin suddenly wondered aloud. She wanted to drown out the strange music entirely.

"You don't like that, do you?" he gestured with his chin toward the source of the strange music with a dark sneer.

"Not even a little bit."

"So change it.", Naraku challenged and stretched his head back with a lazy yawn and looked at his forearms in the meager light.

Rin rolled herself over and stalking over to the monstrosity Naraku called a stereo. After a moment's fiddling, she managed to get the needle off the damn record. Stopping the thing took another couple moments. Reaching her hand into a pile of vinyl, Rin grabbed one, raised her eyebrows at Naraku's bizarre taste in music, took a second look at the title and thinking it the most appropriate thing she'd heard all day, threw the disk onto the machine and dropped the needle unceremoniously down wherever it landed. _So far… so good… so what…_, she mused to herself with a bitter grin.

Snarling guitar suddenly pounded loud into the darkness and then dead air hit her again.

Naraku held a syringe in his mouth and was tying off his arm when she turned back around. He smiled at her as descanting, wicked chords assaulted Rin in her disgusted shock. The room was so dark – the nurse in Rin quailed at the thought of trying to spike a vein without proper lighting. When Naraku effortlessly pushed the needle into his arm and shot the narcotic into his bloodstream, her stomach turned over and Rin was frozen to the spot.

_Did you ever think I'd get lonely?_

_Did you ever think that I needed love?_

_Did you ever think?_

_Stop thinking_

_You're the only one_

_That I'm thinking of_

Snarling venom dripped from the voice in her ear, accusing Rin of pathetic stupidity. How could she even compare? She watched Naraku's red eyes roll back into his head as the speed shock made his body loosen and droop. He managed to throw the needle lock with one slow hand and toss the used syringe onto the table beside him before he nodded his head back on the couch with a gurgling evil giggle.

The hard driving metal music bled hard against Rin's anger as she watched her lover wallow in sick pleasure. She wanted to suddenly beat Naraku back to awareness; she wanted to scream in his delirious face. Thinking reason flew away from her anger at being discarded for another, stronger fix and Rin found herself straddling the laughing physician and screaming at him to wake up. Somewhere, in her rational mind, Rin knew what she was doing was stupid; her hysteria was only going to annoy Naraku and make him laugh harder. When she grabbed his face with both her hands and made him look at her, Naraku laughed and spit in her face.

No one had ever done such a thing to her before and Rin couldn't stop her hand before it slapped the laughing face in front of her hard enough to crack Naraku's neck in a few places. He shrugged his shoulders numbly with a deeply amused lunatic laugh and did it again, hitting her hair this time. Rin slapped him again with the other hand. When Naraku turned his face slowly back to her, black blood oozed from his nose. He reached slowly to his nose, smeared the bubble of dark liquid across his face and tasted it. The fog began to clear but the laughter continued to boil haphazardly from his lips as Naraku swam slowly back to himself. Rin found her arms in his tight grip and she was pulled hard into the man before her as he whispered hotly into her ear, wiping his bloody nose against her neck.

"I wanted to rule the world and give all the idiots a brand new religion, but I failed. Is that what you want to know, little nurse, when you asked me that question?" Naraku growled, the stoned laugher still coloring the tip of his evil tongue.

She felt him sniff hard through his congested nose. Rin felt blood drip against her neck and a moment later, she felt a hot tongue lick the flesh clean. "Now we are even."

"There is no such thing as even, Naraku Onigumo. If something is going to kill you, I want it to be me.", Rin spoke her molten iron heart before thinking.

"Jealousy suits you beautifully! I knew there was more to that stupid mask of compassion you always feign whenever I see you amongst the invalids. But you hide it behind that high and mighty self-righteousness…"

"Shut the fuck up, you sadistic fuck!", Rin screamed in his ear and pushed hard away, trying to get off and away from the grinning beast in her ear. Naraku's steely grip held her as she thrashed, tightening uncomfortably with a barking laugh.

"Oh no girl, you think you're going to find it in that great big heart of yours to love a pathetic monster like me? Are you going to stoop to conquer me as a favor to my blackened soul? Don't kid yourself – do us both that favor. Just who do you think you are to me?" Naraku chided her wickedly; he'd seduced her mind, her body and now there was just her soul. Like everything else in his long life, he'd twist the woman against herself and play with the shattered remains until he was bored or careless, in which case he would be dead. Either way – it didn't matter. She would pass the time until then. He refused to admit to more than that.

"If I'm nothing to you, then let me go!" Rin dared him, pushing hard against his embrace.

"Oh no, girl, not now," Naraku purred, quickly grabbing her ass and pulling her hard against him, licking at her angry lips, whispering, "Give me what is mine."

Rin tasted metallic blood on his lips as she kissed the monster before her with a bitter moan.

~*~

Disoriented and unable to move, Rin awoke in the darkness. Last thing she remembered, Naraku was kissing her, holding her hard upon his naked lap with one large hand and holding her to his lying mouth by the throat with the other. She remembered the feeling of his fingers massaging the side of her neck and then she remembered nothing.

So she was a little surprised to find herself tied up, face to the wall, with her arms spread out over the now familiar white expanse of Naraku's' bed.

"What the fuck jus' happened?" she muttered, testing the restraints at her wrists. They were clinical soft limb restraints she noted. How appropriate; there was no shortage of these on their unit. _Who would miss one pair out of hundreds?_ Rin thought with a shiver.

"Carotid massage, Taisho." Naraku's deep rasping voice enlightened Rin from somewhere out of view.

Rin hated the wicked alchemy of medicine very badly at that moment. Her own body was such a traitor. Twisting her wrists, she succeeded in getting to her knees, but still cold not lay eyes to her captor and the powerlessness of the position began to run a trill of cold panic in her belly. No one had ever tied her up to anything before. She could watch nothing but the dark iron of the bed's monstrous head rail and the wall as a monster stalked her in the unseen darkness.

Fear warred suddenly with desire. Rin listened to her loud breathing in the stretching silence. Nothing around her moved. She strained her senses to locate Naraku in the darkness. How such a large creature could be so quiet on an ancient and creaky wood floor was a miracle of nature, Rin's sarcasm unfurled to cover her unease as she struggled to find the man's dark presence in the quiet room.

Rin did not expect to hear the slurring rasp of metal on a whetstone. But nothing else made that particular noise; she couldn't kid herself it was anything but steel on stone, however her now-panting mind wished it.

_Shhhh-nick._

Rin saw in her mind the long knives hanging in shining hungry perfection on magnetic bars in the kitchen.

_Shhhh-nick._

She watched Naraku casually flip a long filet knife over his fingers as he asked her if she didn't want to just eat in?

_Shhhh-nick._

Her panicky breathing was a loud winter storm in her ears.

Silence.

Rin felt Naraku's weight on the bed; the sound of sheets falling off the mattress in his wake sounded just like the dusty scuttle of rat feet over glass, her terrified mind happily supplied. For some reason, Rin noticed air just couldn't get in and out of her lungs fast enough. She was starting to feel a little dizzy.

Body heat suddenly slinked against her back, moving upwards between her shoulder blades, teasing her. An instant hiss of fear flew from her lips when Rin felt the cold metal nestle between her shoulder blades. She complied instantly when she heard a hard voice commanded her to close her eyes and keep them that way. Rin loved the thread of desire she heard in that hard voice but her heart quailed at the cruelty that formed the rest of its thick skein.

Her skin itched as Rin felt the cold line travel slowly down her spine and she helplessly tried to draw herself away from the hot, liquid trail that followed in its wake as Naraku tongued her spread back. She felt him draw away from her slowly in the small of her back but the knife blade continued down her sacrum, even ghosting between the spread cheeks of her ass, making her whimper and squirm in self-imposed darkness. Rin couldn't help the soft whimpering noises escaping into the dead, close space around her head, even as she hated herself for them utterly.

The hard ringing slap to her ass was like a bucket of cold water over her head and it wrung a yelp from her that sounded treacherously like a plead for more.

"Shut up!" Naraku's cruel voice drilled hard into her ear and Rin did immediately as she was told.

Again she felt Naraku's heat against her and as he knelt behind her, Rin found herself leaning backwards into the surety of her bonds, instinctively pleading with her body for mercy. She rubbed her back, her ass against the warm, unyielding flesh behind her and when Naraku's arms surrounded her, she thought she'd won a respite from his frightening knife-point examination. The sudden hot, velvety hardness she felt rubbing at her spread core was a wicked contrast to the return of the cold line of heavy metal tracing its slow way around her ensnared left breast. Naraku breathed hard into her ear and holding the soft globe of her breast, he teased her with the flat of the blade, alternating the puckering flesh with dangerous strokes. Any moment, Rin feared she'd feel the blaze of hot wet pain and open her eyes screaming to an apron of blood as Naraku cut a… souvenir… from her shivering body.

She could feel Naraku's hard cock begin to slip wetly against her as he slowly teased her with slow thrusts, never entering her but torturing Rin with his own body as well as the knife. Small knots of pleasure pulled and rode within her belly, her tingling skin wherever their bodies made contact and a trail of cold fear, like barbed wire around her heart, kept her panting and squirming, so near to panic in Naraku's cruel grasp.

Rin lost track of time, Naraku might have tormented her for decades, seconds. The feeling of his heavy cock between her legs, his fingers stroking her hungry clit and the shrill sensation of an unseen knife at her throat suddenly made her languid, her knees losing their will to hold her up against the weight of her captor. Moaning hungrily, Rin was a moment from giving in utterly and begging for mercy. Anything to make the pleasure and the fear burst her into flames and consume her! Anything to make him take her, fuck her, devour her and release her!

Naraku pushed the sweaty hair away from Rin's ear.

"What do you want from me, girl?" he whispered thickly, bringing the knife under her throat tight enough for the honed point to bite into the white thin skin.

When she pinched her eyes shut and hesitated, he laughed and pressed a little harder. The way she craned her throat and led the knife was beautiful in his twisted mind.

"Answer me!" he hissed with an unseen smile. The tortured defeat and abject fear of a slit throat upon Rin's drawn face made Naraku's cock so hard it ached; letting his hand stray from her body for a moment, the sadistic butcher gave himself a quick pump to ease the pressure. He didn't want to take her just yet; Naraku still wanted to break her.

"Oh god, I want you to fuck me, Naraku, I can't take this…ahh!", Rin began in a panicky rush, losing her train of thought when she felt her head being pulled back slowly by her hair, the knife drawing up under her jaw. Her eyes flew open at last; she sure her terminal sight on this earth was going to be a red spray upon the white wall as Naraku slit her throat from ear to ear!

"Be silent. I know what you need." he purred and slowly moved the knife from her throat to her lips.

"Open.", he commanded and when she did, Naraku fitted the long blade of the knife, cutting edge outwards into her teeth like a gag.

"Close your mouth and know if you should open your mouth and let the knife fall, I will put it in another mouth and test your grip there." Naraku punctured his growling threat with a hard stroke to her clit, grinding her between his cock and his hand. "_Verstaendlich_?" he whispered hotly around a kiss to her flushed ear.

_Dr. Mengele_, Rin growled mentally and clamped her jaws tightly to the metal in her mouth.

She did not expect what Naraku did next. She felt his weight leave the bed and then she heard a door open and close.

Naraku had left her tied up with a knife in her mouth.

The frustrated scream made Rin's teeth vibrate painfully against the long blade but it was well worth it. She'd never wanted to touch herself so badly in her life! Time passed slowly and Rin drowsed, her head lolling forward, knife in place but askew, day-dreaming of breaking Naraku's dick off when he finally reappeared and fucking herself with it before making him choke on it!

No wonder Father had always wanted her to marry a lawyer.


	8. Chapter 8

PART II

Naraku awoke on the couch when the sun found his eyes. The syringe on the table laughed at him. The whetstone next to it made him smile for real. It also reminded him that he had things to do today. But first he needed a fucking cup of coffee. Silence greeted his listening ears; his little mistress must have finally fallen asleep. Peeling himself up off the couch, Naraku scratched his frizzy, tangled mane and yawned, his face momentarily disappearing into a mouthful of sharp teeth. Closing the dark silk robe around his sleepy form, Rin's keeper moseyed into Hell's kitchen to start another beautiful fucking day.

Naraku carefully stepped around the noisy spots in the floor to silently open the bedroom door. He had to grab clothes before his excursion and those clothes were currently in a pile by his bed. The dark physician noted his captive was still spread-eagle against the wall. He also noted she had wedged the knife blade in between the filigree spars of his headboard. She currently slept propped against the thing like some deadly steel pillow, dark lashes hiding those smoky quartzite eyes full of fury and desire. Damn, he was making himself hard again; but there was time enough for that later. He had to take call tomorrow, so today was going to very much fun. Let the girl sleep; she was going to need it, he smiled wickedly.

Softly grabbing his clothes, Naraku slunk out of his bedroom as the morning's bright sunlight flooded in.

~*~

Rin was being woken by someone moving her body around. Something important prodded her check and blinking her eyes, she noticed she was leaning her head on a large chef's knife wedged into the wrought iron before her. _Knife._ It was somehow an important concept but why…?

The person manipulating her slowly reached up and tried to take the knife from her grasp. Taking the thing quickly in her mouth, Rin refused to let it go. Naraku tried to wiggle the handle out from the spar she'd wedged it into last night but with her head in the way it become much more challenging.

"Let go, girl." he smirked at her steadfastness. "Do as you are told."

Rin turned her eyes to Naraku and coming out of her sleep fog, remembered herself. Then she remembered him.

Rin thought over the many cascading feelings in her imposed solitary confinement overnight. The one that she had settled on, after all the others ebbed, flowed and passed on, was loneliness. That's why she was still here, allowing this brutal, divine treatment at the hands of someone she hated, needed, wanted. Once the anger and frustration had slowly ebbed, Rin forced herself to think. She had thought until sleep claimed her, hours later. She remembered the small inching of reflected street-light across the dark, ancient floor all too well.

She lowered her eyes and let go. Naraku drew out the knife and easily cut the ties on the restraints. Rin shuddered at the ease with which the thick cotton webbing was severed; that knife had been razor sharp. If Onigumo's hand had slipped, he could have easily killed her… and she had begged him to fuck her at the end of that knife. Rin remembered the way her blood had thundered in her ears, throbbed in her hungry body and felt the need for Naraku's wicked touch renewed. She couldn't look at him now because all she wanted to do was look at him.

He helped her bend her stiff, painful arms and when she didn't try to get up or beat him up, Naraku scooped her up and carried her to the bathroom where he helped her to stand on sleep-slack legs while starting the hot water. He kept one dark red eye upon the distant woman lest she snap out of her fugue and tried to harm him while his back was turned. When the steam started to collect on his hair and Rin still had not climbed into the large, full tub, Naraku began to wonder if he had gone too far. Where was her mind?

Sitting on the commode, Naraku drew the withdrawn woman to stand between his long bent legs and really looked at her. She looked back.

Naraku thought she was darkly beautiful: he loved the dark maroon beauty mark his knife had left upon her white throat. He loved his mark upon her flesh; loved the evidence of her fate in his hands. She'd faced him down in all his incarnations with no fear until now, but something weighed so heavy on her mind she couldn't or wouldn't look at him. It made him almost angry to be denied the sight of himself in her hungry eyes.

"Look at me, Rin." Naraku growled up at her.

"No."

"Why?" he asked suddenly, more curious than anything.

"Because I'll lose what little hate I have left for you, you fucking monster. Because if I look at you one more time, Naraku Onigumo, I'm going to lose the will to pretend I don't want you, need you maybe even be in love with you, if that what it could be called.

"I don't know any more. You started out as a grudge fuck, a charity case and have turned into the devil that haunts my dreams and torments my waking hours… I don't fucking know! I don't know what to tell you. You don't care anyway. I mean nothing more to you than an easy distraction to fill that annoying time between fixes, don't I? That's all I've ever been to the whole of goddamn creation! Why should you be any different? What was I hoping to find here?

"There – happy now? Can I go back to trying to make sense of any of this?" Rin suddenly spewed forth with more venom then Naraku had thought possible from the daughter of the great stoic Sesshoumaru Taisho.

Her pain was beautiful; finally, she had admitted him to her heart and Naraku could see the tidal flows of the despair that Rin had kept hidden within her. He just hadn't tumbled the right locks and now that they were overthrown, Naraku understood her better than she knew herself.

"How does that love for me feel, Rin Taisho?" Naraku asked with a hard glare to her turned-away face. "Tell me!" Naraku snarled, turning her face towards him.

"It hurts but I don't want it to stop." Rin whispered in thick voice, forcing herself to stay still under Naraku's hard scrutiny.

"Life is pain and pleasure, ice and fire. That dead thing you called compassion was a lie, a false mask you wear at work – don't mistake the things we are paid to do to others as the way we must live ourselves. The real world is the pain, Rin and the pleasure. Make your own or wilt in the desert of the _real world_ out there.", Naraku's deep voice droned up to her as he held her down with his mad red eyes and she listened against the last of her stubborn will.

"Bastard! Caring for others is what I do!"

"But does not have to be all you are!"

"Cruelty is all that _you_ are!" Rin snapped back painfully. There, she said it.

Naraku looked back at her with a long smile. "You didn't think so when you held me down and tongue-fucked my scar. Nor did you think so when you tormented me in this very room. I am many things; I am cruel, I am quite possibly evil, I am strong and I am disgustingly weak." he admitted with disarming alacrity.

"I am many different monsters, tied up in this person before you and you, woman, are the same. Like calls to like and you know it! We are all many different monsters; who are you to try to narrow them down into the one that will fit the most easily in your hand?" Naraku smiled crookedly, leading the woman before him easily down a path he knew she would never go on her own.

"I am the fool who loves you. Kami help me. Now shut your lying mouth and get out. I'm getting in the damn tub." Rin sighed down at the monster before her. She did not expect him to laugh in her face at her declaration and when he dropped his dark head into her stomach and laughed into her skin, Rin felt exceptionally stupid.

"What, Onigumo, is so fucking funny in what I just said?" Rin rolled her eyes at his amusement. When Naraku drew back to glance hotly up at her through his dark brows, a chill jumped fast down Rin's spine.

"When have I lied to you? When have you told me the whole truth?" he leered back at her.

"Agh! I am through crossing wits with you this morning! Quit assaulting me with semantics before I've had any coffee!" Rin threw her hands up in the air and tried to back out of Naraku's reach. His hands trapped her before she could get anywhere and when he stood, Rin found herself being backed up hard against the steaming tub with nowhere to go.

When Naraku leaned down against her, she felt pinned and cornered and her mind helpfully supplied a Technicolor flash of her tied and spread, being tortured by this man's delicious flesh. She turned her head away from him, trying to ignore the fire flaring up in her tightening nipples, the wetness between her shivering thighs. She felt a sudden hand in her hair, stretching her up on her toes to her lover's hungry mouth, his lips at her throat, her neck, her ticklish ear. She felt a paw to her ass and as Naraku growled into her pliant flesh, he lifted her to ride tightly against his black coated body without hope of escape.

"Assault you? You're so full of good ideas this morning, Taisho.", Naraku purred into her captive ear as his hand on her ass slipped between her twining legs, his fingers finding her body slick and hungry for him. "Bathe first and laze about in the water if you like. There's always coffee afterwards. This is a house of medicine, after all." Naraku smiled in her ear as he slowly fingered her.

"Interesting methods you have, Doctor." Rin sighed out with both weakening resolve and sarcasm, trying unsuccessfully to extricate herself from his embrace.

"You love it.", he replied smugly and released her neatly back to the cool floor, licked his fingers lewdly for her benefit and then left her alone, heaving and needy, to her morning absolutions.

"Fuck! I do love it…" Rin swore quietly, with feeling and scrubbed her face with her hands to try to clear her spinning head.


	9. Chapter 9

The smell of coffee roused her from the soporific wet dream she was having in the still tub. The sound of muffled Flamenco guitar finished the job of rousting her out of her protean depths and towel-bound, amazed by what her ears were hearing, Rin poked her head outside the bedroom door.

Naraku had his wide back to her and he was playing a guitar. Neither dark nor bright, the music seemed to drip carelessly from his fingers to twine in spare, otherworldly complexity in her ear. After having tried haphazardly to play the damned instrument, Rin had given it up in utter frustration a decade before – but her understanding went further than her fingers could fashion. It was spectrally beautiful, bony music – seemingly fragile and torturously difficult. More than anything, it sounded ephemeral and fragile.

Many different monsters, indeed.

She would never have guessed at such hidden talent in a hundred years. Peaking quietly over Naraku's shoulder, Rin watched, hypnotized by the careful ease Naraku's fingers slithered over the neck of the ancient Martin acoustic. She spied a couple of long black waving hairs stuck around a tuning peg and was captivated as her vision pinpointed down to the soft vibrations as they waved in the strange aural current around her. Hours, lifetimes, aeons slowly unwound in her ear… topographical oceans lapped…

So long as he kept playing, Naraku could have killed her on the spot and Rin would have never noticed. Coffee was long forgotten until the slow filigree of notes trickled down into silence. Naraku looked at her through far-away eyes for a long moment and her wide smoky eyes stared back in wonder.

"You're getting water on the floor."

"Uh… floor?"

"Yes, half-wit – that hard splintery thing under your wet ass."

"Don't stop."

Naraku leaned over the instrument and grinned evilly at his prey. "Say that again and make me believe it.", he growled hungrily, teasing her.

"Huh? Oh fuck you, asshole. I need coffee. Take some lessons – it wasn't that good." Rin lied through her teeth testily and unpeeled herself from his presence.

"Oooh, baby… don't stop…", Naraku dramatically moaned out, his nightmare-colored head thrown back, mad eyes squeezed shut in feigned ecstasy, as he bent strings in slick accompaniment. Rin found herself frozen in place again, a breath away from ripping her towel off and fucking the vicious tease before her within an inch of his wicked life.

"I hate you so much right now." Rin narrowed her eyes and snarled.

"Good. Enjoy the coffee and then amuse yourself for an hour. I have work to do, Taisho."

"Yes, Doctor Onigumo." she snapped back far too sweetly and flicked him off on her way to the dangerous kitchen.'

When she found her way into a cup of coffee, Rin then found Naraku before her, guitar gone, bearing a gift. The fact that the large box before Onigumo had her name on it in his oft-deciphered script filled Rin with no little trepidation.

"Never trust doctors bearing gifts." she murmured nervously to herself and after glancing at the looming physician for approval, Rin lifted the lid.

Within the large box were clothes. Knowing Naraku well enough by now, she wondered how much of her would indeed be covered. Dark green silk slithered around as she touched it, revealing other items, other colors: midnight blue linen, crimson satin, even smoke-grey velvet. She wanted to simply run her hands over and over the tactile wonderland within the mysterious package, but Naraku withdrew the top item, a dark forest green robe of China silk, probably worth more than any three pieces of furniture in her unheeded apartment – when was the last time she was there? – And draped it over her naked shoulders, where it floated upon her like a second skin.

"Stand up, Taisho." Naraku whispered into her ear with unnatural gentleness.

Moved by the strange tenderness within Naraku's deep voice, Rin did as she was told. Slowly, she let him peel the damp towel from her cool skin. When Naraku ducked his head to mouth the reddened skin left in the rough towel's wake, she leaned back and let him. She was pliant and soft as he kissed her breasts, one then the other as he pulled her thin arms through the cool dark sleeves. When she felt teeth graze her there as well, she fisted her hands in his dark, wild hair and held him in place, offering him suck at her sore nipples as she swayed on weakening knees. When he pried her clawing hands from his hair, it was with eyes filled with devious pleasure at her unsatisfied, painful hunger. Closing the front of the garment, Naraku tied her shut for later torments with a knowing, wicked smile.

"I want you to fuck me, Naraku. Now." Rin breathed in panting frustration, uncaring where her submission put her as long as it was on the end of Naraku's punishing cock.

"I know you do." He leered down at her with a haughty grin, moving his hands from her waist to her ass and squeezing hard. Naraku gasped with her when he felt Rin grab his cock through his clothes as he squeezed her ass. Her eyes were blazing up at him with pain and sex, it was all he could do to not throw her down and break her in half! But plans were plans…

"I believe I said amuse yourself, little girl." Naraku whispered hotly and extricated himself quickly from her fingers before she could undo him completely.

"I have been for two days, but I guess I'm building up a tolerance; I need another fix to slake my thirst, baby…" she grinned wickedly and cupped her silk-clad breasts for emphasis.

"Little bitch, get out of my sight before I start cutting things off and you may be sure, they will be things you… will… miss!", Naraku hissed at her with sudden fury, pulling the knife out of his pocket that he'd forgotten to shelve earlier.

He loved the look of defiance and unbridled lust that surfaced quickly in her eyes at the sight of his fury, and while Naraku hated to see her go, he loved to watch Rin leave as she made her giggling, swaying way back to his bedroom, cup of coffee neatly in hand.

_Score one for me_, Rin mused with a wicked smile and tried to slow the hammering of her hungry heart.

~*~

She emerged occasionally, her finger marking her place in the book she'd found in her bag. Each time she heard Naraku muttering and the dry slither of papers being shuffled across a desk in a back room somewhere. Rin could just see the physician's long form perched over a large desk as he dictated and wrote. At one point she watched in fluttering anticipation as he wielded a long letter opener against a pile of correspondence; she could easily imagine him cutting her from the enforced silken covering she now wore around his cavernous house. The imagined feeling of his hands roughly peeling her open into naked submission nearly doubled her over with a jolt of pleasure down her spine. Gods, she needed to get LAID!

Somewhere in her mind, a small voice just couldn't believe she was lusting after Dr. Naraku Onigumo. The larger, hungrier mental part roared obscenities and the small doubt was quickly tucking tail and running for the metaphorical hills.

After a quietly resolved trip through the kitchen full of Sharp-Pointy Things, Rin found there was a balcony of sorts she could enjoy the unseasonably warm sun in relative solitude. A brass basin full of blackened lava rock serving as a fire pit and a large hammock seemed to be all there was to the space, except a strange cactus-looking vine crawling in predatory shade over the ancient wrought iron of the railing, half-shielding the hammock from the sun. Various torches leaned haphazardly from heavy iron stands. It did not appear to be well used at all. The plant itself looked neglected and something in Rin's mind stated it probably preferred it that way.

Hopping into the hammock and scootching carefully around until she was comfortable under the dappled succulent shade, Rin once more lost herself in her book. Lazy and languid in the sun, she quickly fell asleep.

~*~

PART III

Rin was having the best dream ever. Hands were all over her, twisting her and lips were sucking, caressing her nipples, the valley between her breasts, the fuzzy hallow of her stomach and her ticklish hips. She fidgeted in her formless dream-state and those long hands held her down as the lips continued to peruse her, slowly learning the lines and keys of her body. She felt herself sway weightless in the air as her thighs were pushed slowly open and then gasping for sudden breath; she felt lips traveling along one of those thighs, leaving fire curling, snapping towards her center in their wake.

When she felt the dream lips ghost over her pussy, Rin felt a cry flee from her open mouth with thankful release. But if she thought the lips and hands were nice, she was unprepared for the pleasure the tongue could give her. She heard strange cries of bliss drifting around her head like smoke and only after a moment's writhing pleasure, recognized them as her own. Warm, white cotton shrouded her vision and she felt a cool mass of hair at the apex of her spread thighs and twined her fingers hard in it, forcing the hot mouth upon her to suck harder, lick deeper. Every time she felt that most talented sear of absolute pleasure as the mouth upon her rhythmically tongued her clit, Rin felt herself bent backwards in the warm air of oblivion, stretching herself hard towards some epic release. When an eternity of kaleidoscopic pleasure pressed her finally over a quavering, crying edge, she felt fingers invading her squeezing body to slake the instinctive thirst to be _filled_ and her countdown complete, she exploded on her dream lover's tongue like a star.

Rin awoke, sweaty and shaking, to find Naraku on his knees between her legs, feasting on the dying dregs of her massive nocturnal emission. He'd turned her sideways in the hammock and the angle, combined with his height made her undoing an easy thing. Rin cussed the Kami above her that she'd slept through the best part. But what a great dream…!

"Oh my god, don't stop…" Rin groaned when he lapped at a particularly wonderful spot within her.

"Oh, you can beg better than that, little Rin." Naraku leered from his place between her legs with a wet, sloppy smile.

Rin sent a slap to his obnoxious head, which Naraku caught neatly before it landed and pulled the limp woman upright out of her happy place.

The dying sun reflected magenta fire in Naraku's maroon eyes as he peeled her boneless from the hammock to stand on rubbery legs.

"Get dressed. We're going out." he commanded with a leer.


	10. Chapter 10

It looked like a dead thing slung over Naraku's back… was all Rin could think as they walked out into the night. The tall physician had a large soft, morbidly large case slung strategically across his scarred back. Rin couldn't tell if he was in pain or not, the dark blue lenses shielded his dried-blood gaze from her scrutiny; which bothered her. Naraku had the habit of hiding his pin-point eyes behind the creepy spectacles and Rin sourly knew the reason for their appearance.

The good Doctor Onigumo was flying high and fast tonight, Rin reflected and shivered in her crawling skin; was that crawling in fear? She didn't think so.

Naraku's great dark coat flapped like ragged wings around his lean form and something in his manner seemed to make him stand out rather than ooze into the background. A small child started crying when the tall man passed both him and his mother on the dirty sidewalk, and seeing this, Naraku smiled in tight pleasure. Rin followed in his wake, her grey velvet dress swirling coolly around her in sublime understatement. The long black satin ribbons that twined up her arms like restraints, reminding her of her captivity with every swing of her arms. The damn wind kept catching the fabric around her booted legs and the thigh-high slits caused her to flash milky skin to the world with every step, especially since Naraku's legs were nearly as long as she was tall and he was hell-bent on walking fast!

"Onigumo, slow down; are we out for a jog or what?" Rin asked glibly to try to drag the stalking demon out of himself.

"If I were running, you'd never catch me, girl." he barked through gritting teeth, but did slow down minutely.

Of course, try as she might, Rin found no lingerie of any kind in the wardrobe Naraku had gifted her with. _Of course_… she smirked before she remembered to be annoyed. That lovely little detail made stomping on the terra after his tall ass… uncomfortably free.

They walked and walked. Rin started to notice maybe she should have carried her boots. Just as she was trying to decide is her feet were trying to hurt, Naraku grabbed her arm and turned her into a dark, nondescript building, flushing her quickly through the door.

"Where are we?" Rin wondered aloud, mostly for her benefit.

"Come on, beauty – let's go." Naraku grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and pushed her in front of him, after a small discussion with a dark entity she hadn't seen before at the door.

"Hey asshole, I do know how to walk! Let go!" Rin squawked angrily and dug in her heels. Something about Naraku's mood and his haste bothered her but she just couldn't place it. She saw him grind his jaws together in agitation and found herself squeezed against the wall, his long hot hand at her throat.

"If you don't want me to drag you, Rin", Naraku whispered into her mind, his nose touching her ear, "then move that pretty ass of yours and keep up."

"What is bothering you so much?" Rin shot back, shoving her hands deep in the woolen darkness surrounding them both, searching for Naraku's whip-hard body.

"Bothering me?" Naraku laughed into her throat, nipping the flesh. "Nothing. Everything. A countdown to ecstasy." Feeling Rin's hands upon him, the laughing physician pulled them hard behind his back, throwing Rin into him with a surprised squeak.

"While I'd like nothing more than to fuck your brains out right here, I'd forget everything I ever learned. Next time you see me, think about the way my tongue felt in your pussy; I want to see it in your face, little Rin. Think only of me.", Naraku growled hard in her ear.

Rin didn't like the idea that he sounded like he was leaving her to her own devices in this strange dark place, so she dug her nails into his back in protest.

The heavy hiss of pain and need in Naraku's voice as her nails pressed him over her was most satisfying.

"Go through that door before I fuck you to death, Taisho – now!" Naraku snarled and then he and his strange cargo were gone.

~*~

"You got my message, my dear Spider."

"Of course, don't patronize your elders, little Kagura."

"Quit calling me that, Naraku!"

"Why? I love my little sister, oh yes… Kohaku, don't touch what's not yours!"

"Whoa, Naraku brought the Warbeast – he's gonna play with us tonight?"

"My dear brother is coming out of his cave? There must be a reason…"

"Juuroumaru, what is covering your face? Take that stupid mask off!"

"Kagura, quit your bitching, already – shit, girl, you need to get laid… my brother Kageroumaru is in town. Want me to hook you up?"

"Unless he's got a pussy and tits, I'm not interested – now where's Kanna with our shit…?"

~*~

Rin followed the sound of a heavy industrial beat and found herself in a dark, cavernous place that may have once been a ballroom or perhaps a theater in its last incarnation. Reaching up to the surgical steel punch Naraku had stabbed into her dark messy bun in unconscious need, she made her way into the slowly oozing mass of people within the decaying nightclub.

Rin found the bar and miracles never ceased because they had Caol Ila scotch. She started a tab and decided the price of her love tonight was her… date's… problem now. _Had she ever seen Naraku drink alcohol? _Rin wondered as she moved through the knots of people around her. Her mind helpfully supplied that no, he wouldn't mix alcohol and narcotics, not if the mad doctor had half a brain and Rin knew he had more than just half. That was his problem, she mused.

She noticed a thin albino girl carrying musical gear and remembered her from somewhere. Her dead eyes grazed Rin and were on to better things, just like the last time they'd crossed gazes. Naraku had mentioned the bassist before… _who do_ _you think taught little Kagura to play?_.. And Rin was half-excited to hear her play again. She suddenly wondered what Kagome was up to tonight and felt a distant pang of regret for not calling her friend; Kagome must be wondering what the _fuck_ happened to her! Sipping her liquid fire, Rin mused on the fact that she had fallen into Naraku and never emerged again. She was still plunging hard through his dark cold depths, even now. Flashes of their vicious couplings suddenly flayed her mind open and Rin found she was glad of the hard, cool wall behind her trembling back. She hoped it looked like she was leaning casually against it, instead of it holding her up against the filthy assault of her own mind.

A serpentine voice screamed over heavily distorted guitar about battery drain and told her to light the fuse and go…

_I've lost my sight to save my mind…_

The band was nearly set up, checking tune and channels and Rin was suddenly torn between watching Naraku tune a wicked-looking B.C. Rich bass and avoiding Kagome, who apparently was summoned by her guilty thoughts that very minute. She appeared with the pack of gothic wolves Rin had bumped into two days ago…an eternity ago… and Rin noted with offhand curiosity that Mohawk Guy now sported blue tippets to his spiked blond mane. The dark leader of that vicious looking pack had his arm possessively around Kagome's waist and she appeared quite happy about that.

"Don't see me, don't see me, don't see me…" Rin murmured into her drink to any god who would listen, all of which ignored her utterly.

"Oh my god! Rin! Where have you been?" Kagome saw her and came rushing into her dark hiding place against the helpful wall.

"Hey, uh… well, it's a funny story, that…" Rin stalled as she tried to think of a way out of the conversation completely.

"Well, I expect you to explain it to me, but hey – this is Kouga.", Kagome switched gears, smiling hotly up at her companion, whose dark wolfish smile never quite made it to his nearly colorless blue eyes. Predatory men bothered her… strange, when she was currently caught hard in the web of the scariest man she'd ever laid her professional and personal eyes on.

"Oh my god; duck!" Kagome's eyes bugged out comically and she threw herself and Rin around quickly.

"What the fuck's gotten into you?" Rin hissed angrily, sloshing scotch on the floor and her toes.

"Is that…is that Onigumo?" Kagome gasped in disbelief. Rin had forgotten about that…

"Uh…yeah, that'd be him." Rin looked briefly in the dark man's direction and then turned quickly back around. _Long white hands drew her down onto his thick cock in her mouth… and she took it in, hungrily…_

Electricity shot down Rin's spine.

"Kagura is his little sister. The Spider is a wicked guitarist, when he can be persuaded to emerge from his lair." Kouga helpfully supplied, slipping his arms around Kagome's waist, pulling her hard into him.

"Spider?" Rin asked, playing dumb. She'd seen it… apparently this Kouga had too.

"Maybe he won't notice you, Rin. It's been just fine that his partners have been making rounds on the unit the last couple of days… it's been a vacation!", Kagome laughed and wiggled her skirted ass against the wolf behind her, earning a her happy growl for her attention.

"You two need to get a room." Rin smiled, happy to divert her friend's attention.

"The sounds like a perfect idea…" Kouga laughed into Kagome's hair. "Nice dress, girl. Someone's got you tied up like a lamb for slaughter – it suits you very well."

Rin gave him a watery smile and shivered in her skin, hiding her spiking nerves in her drink. _You have no idea…_

"Come party with us, Rin! You can tell me where and who you've been these past two days. Where did you get that dress, anyway – pretty freaky…?" Kagome enthused, not quite letting her off the hook yet, taking Rin girlishly by the hand and dragging her back to the wolf pack.

"It was a gift." Rin replied absentmindedly and immediately wished she hadn't. _Fuck…_

Hakkaku was happy to see her again and Rin only had to snarl at him once to keep his fucking hands off her before he got the hint. He shrugged her rejection off amiably and pretended to be interested so the rest of the pack would keep off of her. Rin thanked the guy by buying him a drink, not bothering to mention who was picking up the tab.

The band started by enjoined the crowd to join them in getting fucked up and wasted, and shot fast into a raging cover of "Lust for Life." Juuroumaru's driving drums threw the urge to move, to rage hard through Rin's veins. Naraku's tall form seemed to bleed into the shadows around him and he appeared to Rin to be thinking about mowing the lawn, walking the dog, next week's grocery list – for all the concern on his pale face.

"That was him, wasn't it, the first time at the bar; I remember the blue glasses." Kagome shouted in her ear suddenly.

_I'm worth a million in prizes…no more beating my brains… no more beating my brains, with liquor and drugs… with liquor and drugs…_

Kagura moaned over the throaty bass growl Naraku effortlessly supplied. Free of her own instrument for a change, she ground herself hard into Kohaku with sexy suggestion, snarling her lines with black humor… Naraku, underneath, leading them all…

"Yes.", Rin admitted over the thundering roar.

"That's where you've been, hasn't it?" Kagome cornered her. "Oh my god… what the hell are you doing?" she hissed in genuine concern.

"I don't know… it doesn't matter." Rin extemporized, avoiding Kagome's big dark eyes. Kouga caught her trying to evade like mad and had pity on her. The band was had wound down hard and were enjoining the crowd to drink a social. Kagura shot a thick black liquid Rin had a feeling was Jagermeister, whooped, and her excitement rippled through the amassed crowd like a wave.

"Thank my brother for this next one, right Naraku? Or would that be "Satisfaction?" As in you can't get no?" Kagura jeered at the dark figure hanging lazily over his blood-etched instrument, who smiled a mouthful of sharp teeth in a menacing grimace. The long jade drops in the singer's ears tinkled as she shook her merry head in laughter at his expense. Naraku barked something and Kohaku looked nervous. Juuroumaru focused his dead eyes and blew out his long blonde hair.

Kouga grunted out a laugh and interrupted Kagome's sputtering rationale about why yes, Rin's apparent affair with Onigumo mattered one hell of a lot. Taking Rin by the arm, the pack leader asked Rin if she wanted to dance and gave her little choice in the matter, as Kohaku and Naraku launched into the raunchy, dirty blues of "Born Under A Bad Sign".

Rin found herself pulled up hard against the dark, lupine man behind her as he lead her to slither and crawl along his muscular form. She didn't really even have to think, and it was a nice change from trying to lead Kagome's awkward steps. Rin found herself watching Naraku as he walked Kohaku's call and answer guitar with cold ease – the bass line formed the slinky sway of a harlot's hips and Kohaku's squalling riffs were the punctuation marks of high fuck-me pumps in her ears. Kouga became the pole Rin found herself writhing against, and though he kept his hands in very public places upon her, she wondered what kind of hot display of sexual suggestion they formed to the bar around them.

_If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all…_

"Look back over my shoulder." Kouga's smiling voice was sudden in her ear.

Rin did as she was told and saw Naraku, his glasses pushed high in his full unbound mane, staring her down hard. He looked… oh god, he looked… hungry… angry… evil.

Kagura looked from Rin to her brother and slinked over. Grabbing a long hank of black hair, Kagura wrapped it suggestively around her throat as she continued her low, throaty blues growl. Kohaku appeared to be in his own personal nirvana, his big eyes watching everything and nothing in his musical rapture. Naraku continued the complex contrapuntal rhythm, his hot eyes daring Rin to continue in her play, his rhythms following her hips.

"You're making him crazy, you know that? I can see why, woman – your ass is riding my cock for this whole place to see." Rin's dark partner leered, his ghostly eyes crinkling in laughter at her sudden and deep blush. When she tried to pull away, Kouga grabbed her easily and spun her back against him with a wolfish grin.

"Where're ya going? It is way too much fun to fuck with him, isn't it?" Kouga smirked and lifted her arms back over her head to circle his neck, stretching Rin out along his slowly twisting body, making her dress and its morbidly high slits ride higher…higher…

Running his hands over her hips slowly, he leaned down and reminded her of her lack of panties… shooting the glaring bassist a lupine grin while he was at it.

"The Spider hates it when I touch his things, doesn't he? Just thinking about what he's probably going to do to you later is making me so hard; your friend's going to be tired later, girl.", the laughing predator growled in Rin captive ear as the song wound down to a grimy close. Loosing her from his grasp, Kouga led Rin back to where Kagome was watching them, hungrily. Rin looked over her shoulder casually and caught Naraku's eyes hard upon her as he tuned up for the next song…

She suddenly tasted leather and felt her thighs suddenly get wet as she slipped back up to the table her drink was sweating upon. Kagura unwound her brother's hair from her sweating throat and told the entire bar that she needed someone to buy her a drink and she wasn't singing another song until someone did.

"You assholes are on your own until some hot fucker shows me some love! You guys are holding me down when I wanna be free!", she laughed out and sauntered over to Kouga's pack with a shit-eating grin, flying high and fast on the wind of her own adrenaline.

Kagome was trying to swallow Kouga's face as Rin looked at her for help. The last thing she wanted to tangle with was Naraku's half-drunk, all-crazed sister. The same cruel madness glinted in the witch's maroon eyes, yet hot mischief burned where her brother's cold disdain usually lived. It was the difference between them.

Hakkaku and Ginta, another of the wolfen pack of tattooed freaks and geeks around her, both offered the thirsty vixen among them a drink and she agreed whole-heartedly with both of them. When they returned, thick black poison in hand, Kagura took both shots, nudged Rin suddenly and smiled knowingly.

"I wanna hear you assholes play something GOOD!" she growled in a very loud and haughty voice to the musicians before her.

"Go somewhere else then, you drunk whore!" Juuroumaru shot back with a laugh.

"Gimme danger, brother – I neeeeeeeeed it…" she pleaded hungrily, taunting Naraku over her shoulder and winked at Rin.

"No." was the hard, cold reply.

"Oh yes, I wannnnna feeeeeeel it.", Kagura moaned and humped the nearest body next to her, who happened to be Hakkaku – the sloppy grin on his face said he was game for anything the singer felt like dishing out.

Kagura opened her mouth to continue to beg, but Rin cut her off.

"Pony up bitch!" she yowled and taking the shot from Kagura's surprised hand, shot the thing in one gulp, giving Naraku a dirty leer all her own.

The tight smile on Naraku's tight face promised Rin her doom, once he got a hold of her… and his hard eyes told her that time was running down fast.

Kouga whispered something into the giggling Kagome's ear. Kagura looked hard at Rin for the first time, the calculating look in her eyes as she thought reminding Rin of her brother's cold stare.

"I like you girl! If you decide to eat my brother's black heart and are still hungry for more, you look me up.", the witch hit shamelessly on Rin with a smirk, the red and white fans tattooed on her shoulders shaking with amusement as she laughed.

Naraku smiled and spoke a quick word to Kohaku, who nodded, laughing and switched his instrument with the tall bassist. Stepping out of the shadows, Naraku looked back at the drummer and after moving the mic up, and spoke.

"This is for my lovely little sister, since she's in the mood for requests." He growled with half a smile that never reached his red eyes, counted out a fast punk four and _screamed -_

"_I got something to say – I killed your baby today_

_And it doesn't matter much to me as long as it's dead._

_And I got something to say – I raped your mother today_

_And it doesn't matter much to me as long as she spreads._

Kohaku manhandled the enormous bass and Juuroumaru flew, cymbals like a shotgun blast, howling the strangely crooning chorus over Naraku's mad scream.

"_Sweet lovely Death, I am waiting for your breath_

_Come sweet Death, one last caress._"

Kouga and his boys howled and egged the maniacal physician on for a second verse – even Kagura was smiling and giving her brother the double bird. Kagome's jaw nearly hit the table in shock; she'd never heard anyone say such vile things with such _glee_ before and was too shocked to say so. Rin couldn't believe she was looking at a doctor. Doctors did not smile at the thought of killing babies or raping people's mothers… Naraku was a sick motherfucker in her mind… oh god, why then, did she want him so fucking bad all of a sudden?

The band let the feedback ring and Kagura was making her way back to the band, when Rin decided she needed to get away from every crazy person around her, including herself.

"Riiiiinnnnn…" Naraku's dark amplified voice rose from behind her, nailing her in place.

Rin turned her head and wished she hadn't.

"Get off my stage, you sick fuck! Which one of you freaks would believe my dear brother is a doctor? Who feels safer now – c'mon?" Kagura yelled, taking Kohaku's proffered guitar as Naraku unburdened himself and gave her a pantomimed jerk off.

"I've got better things to do than play with your toys, Kagura." Naraku leered at Rin and dismissed his sister.

"Rin – don't.", Kagome called over to her in low warning.

Naraku Onigumo whipped his head around in Kagome's direction and gave her his best physician stare-down, knowing exactly who and what she was.

"It's much too late for that." he sneered viciously and curling over Rin's frozen shoulder, kissed her roughly. When he released her lips and lead her into the bar's darkness, Rin Taisho gladly went.


	11. Chapter 11

Kagura's thick rasp carried in Rin's ears as she found herself half-dragged to a previously unseen stair.

"Climb.", Naraku commanded and Rin began to ascend. The debris and dust around her made Rin curious; where the hell were they going? Naraku drove her quickly before him, not allowing her time to think or refuse. When Rin slowed her ascent to look around, he pushed her forward; if she didn't want to be drug up the long dark staircase, she had to keep moving.

Rin was tired of being led against her will, especially since it was her will that was working against her here. She could feel Naraku's breath on her back, across her upswept hair and it was maddening in its shrill sensation. Cresting the top of the stairs, Rin blinked in the dull darkness, trying to see. She heard Naraku folding the delicate metal arms of his spectacles. She could see his dark outline, a specter merging up to meet her from the dusty darkness. The band was distant noise, tuning and generally dicking around. Rin decided she was going to ignore that which wanted her attention the most and instead chose to satisfy her morbid curiosity; just how high were they off the floor?

Very high, it turned out and as she looked down over the steel rail, Rin wondered how high it would have to be before the fall killed her; where was the threshold? The idea of thresholds rose in her mind briefly until she felt a hand on hip. Naraku grinned over her shoulder and reading her mind, filled in the blanks.

"If you fell, you would probably survive…" he hissed into her ear with a dark streak of humor lacing his slow voice, "Any last words, Taisho?"

"Even you wouldn't dare…!" Rin whipped around in sudden fear. Naraku's red eyes held her instantly, smoldering with hate, love and need. It was a slick fist of desire that held her, caught between two paths, the drop from either just as sheer and very high.

Kagura's rich voice rose and with a quick shout the band started hard into another song. Thick seductive guitar rode nervous, hungry drums as Kagura moaned out the words.

_Gimme me danger, little stranger…_

"Wouldn't I? Haven't I already done it? Whose arms are you going to run to when you want to forget me?" Naraku taunted her hard, stepping back, freeing her from the ledge.

He continued to back up, smiling wickedly as he tormented her with what she already knew, knew and didn't want to admit.

_There's nothing in my dreams just some ugly memories…_

"If you think someone else's lips are going to erase the taste of me from your tongue, you just rush back down those stairs right now." He taunted from the depths of the high darkness.

_If you can be my master, I will do you anything…_

"Every time you see me touch a patient, auscultate a chest, you are going to feel my hands on you, Rin Taisho… in you…my girl…

"Shut up.", Rin snarled quietly and stepped forward.

_I swear you're gonna feel my hand… swear you're gonna feel my hand…_

"Every time you see me, you're going to think of my face, my cock, my sick and twisted hunger…", Naraku's husky voice dropped, tracing like fire behind Rin's wide eyes.

"I said shut the fuck up!" Rin barked harshly and bolted into the tormenting darkness. Unthinking, she slammed hard into Naraku where he stood and together they went down in the dusty dark. Grabbing at the riot of hair around Naraku's insanely grinning face, Rin pulled his head back and shut him up by shoving her tongue in his lying mouth.

_Gimme danger… little stranger_…, Kagura moaned in ecstasy somewhere far below.

She felt Naraku's hands all over her, and what he couldn't get to, Rin pulled him to fiercely. Leaning her backwards over his lap, Naraku pushed the front of her grim dress down until she heard the protesting popping of stretched seams; then she heard nothing but her own hungry pants over the loud throbbing of the music below, winding out in hungry seduction. Still fisting Naraku's wild mane, she held him hard to her breasts, wincing in obscene pleasure when he bit her nipples with growling moans of his own.

Forgetting herself, Rin let her hands out of Naraku's hair and running them hard down his back, she pulled him hard over her with a sharp cry. Remembering, she smiled wickedly and dug her long nails as hard as she could into the dark, scarred flesh under her hands.

Naraku snarled and threw her off of his lap, "Little bitch!"

Pulling herself off the floor, Rin lifted herself up to her hands and knees, leaning against the rail that saved her from a terrible fall with a hungry leer. "That's right and you love it, don't you?" she sneered and shook her hair down over her bare shoulders.

Naraku's eyes lit with hellfire and he was on top of her before she could draw breath to taunt him again. She ripped his shirt open and then his skin, leaving raw nail tracks down his flat stomach. He flipped the front of her dress up and was inside of her before she knew it, the dark wings of his long coat draped over their sweating, pumping bodies like the wings of a demon.

"I don't just fucking _love_ it, I fucking _need_ it…!" he snarled into her ear, breathing hard and slamming her into the floor with his heavy form, over and over.

Rin arched her back and felt her hair begin to fall off the ledge that they lay precariously close to. She could feel Naraku lift her hips and when he slipped out of her momentarily, Rin used the moment's opportunity to reposition. Turning quickly over on all fours, Rin gripped the thin steel before her and shooting her dark lover a molten glance over her shoulder, thrust her body out for more… more… more…

Naraku was on her in a second and fisting a hand in her hair, bent her back into him, fucking her so hard she swore she could taste him on the back of her tongue. Every time he slipped hard within her, pain and pleasure shot up her spine, every time he slammed hard back into her, her black silken wrapped arms ground into the steel before her, bruising her – making her mute open mouth tremble with pent-up screams for harder, faster, more…

Leaning backwards, Naraku drug her hard back against him, wrenching her neck and when she wound her arms back over his sweaty mane to hang on for dear life, the beast let go of her hair, grabbed her hips, and ground her hard and fast on his cruel length within her. Stars flashed behind her unseeing eyes and unable to hold onto her cries, began to wordlessly beg for the touch of the long fingers at her clit.

Rin could feel Naraku hard within her, stabbing her, hurting her and yet giving her the best fuck of her life. Looking over her bent shoulder, his sweating vicious face was the last spark to throw Rin hard over the screaming threshold of orgasm. Losing her mind, yowling hard through clenched teeth, Rin felt Naraku grow harder within her. When he slammed her down hard upon his lap, the beast sunk his teeth hard into her craning neck and exploded within her spasming depths. The pain sent Rin's mind into screaming white light…

When she came back to herself, she found she was still impaled upon Naraku, who was softening within her and holding her up. She heard his panting breaths over her head somewhere and felt the suction of their wet bodies against her back as she trembled and moaned, trying to get herself together to move.

A small chip of mother-of-pearl caught her eye in the darkness… Rin leaned over in Naraku's lap, heedless of the moan it pulled from the man within her and picked up the small object for a better look. It was a button.

~*~

She'd really ruined the shirt. Naraku appeared to care less that the entire bar was going to see the bloody welts that drew like guilty graffiti down his pale body. Pulling his hair out from under his ubiquitous coat, Naraku helped Rin readjust the top of her abused dress. Rin could still feel his cock within her and when he wound her dark thick hair back up into a sloppy bun, she could still feel her neck being pulled back in delicious submission.

Spearing her hair with the strewn steel rod, Rin was surprised at the hunger that bloomed hard and fresh for the man standing before her, idly rubbing his sore stomach and leering at her awkward little, full steps. Damn, she hated going commando…!

As they descended the long stair, Naraku pulled her back into his shivering body for a quick kiss. When she felt his tongue run across the sore spot where he had bitten her, Rin knew she was going to have one _hell_ of a bruise.

"Fuck that hurts, quit touching it!" she hissed and swatted at the physician behind her.

"People are going to say we're in love." he laughed evilly in her ear and led her back to her wide-eyed friends.

~*~

Rin didn't remember what she said to Kagome afterwards. Her friend was falling hard for her wolf prince, anyway and wasn't especially eager to detach herself from Kouga's face to question her. The band was taking a set break and hobnobbing with the crowd. Kagura winked at her when she caught Rin's eye. Kohaku looked embarrassed and when he whispered something to Juuroumaru, the blond laughed and pinched the boyish guitarist on the ass, making him jump with a yelp.

Naraku grabbed his guitar, stowing it back into its case, and when he was done they made a quick and unseen exit back out into the night… Rin was surprised that Naraku didn't bitch at her for the bar tab. Not that she saw him pay it. On the way out the door, Rin hoped Kagura made some good tips… scotch was expensive…

~*~

Naraku captured her in his large bed, pulled the unlaced dress from her body and slowly tortured her with his long white hands until she begged him to let her come. When she did reach her wet, thrashing end, it was as Naraku whispered laughing obscenities into her ear. Rin couldn't help the intense and undeniable languor that draped quickly over her as she merged back into the waking world and curling herself against Naraku's cool, sweating body, fell down hard into the sleep of the sated and the just.

~*~

An alarm was going off. _Time to go to work_ her mind helpfully supplied. A pair of filched surgical scrubs from the hospital lay over her sleepy legs, just waiting for her to put her professional life back on like a favorite pair of underwear… yeah, that reminded her… she needed to find a pair of those…

Coming back from the bathroom, she noticed the bed was empty and thought that was odd, especially since it wasn't hers to begin with… sleep-fogged, Rin threw the scrubs on and went in search of caffeine.

Leaving the bedroom, Rin's mind slammed itself hard into first gear and hit the gas. Naraku Onigumo was sprawled out boneless on the floor, his red eyes rolled back into his head, his breathing agonal and labored. A syringe lay near his twitching fingers, still uncapped by the safety lock. He'd overdosed sometime in the night and if Rin Taisho didn't get her head together right now, he was going to die right there on the floor before her.

"FUCK!", Rin swore and seeing the black case Naraku kept his drugs in upon the table, she quickly dumped the entire contents on the couch, searching for what she knew any medical professional always kept on hand when they played with narcotics. She quickly flipped over vials and bottles until she found an ampoule marked "Shikon Pharmaceuticals" in bright pink, friendly letters. Remembering Naraku's voice, she looked at the expiration date, cracked the top of the glass tube and grabbing a syringe off the mess upon the couch, withdrew the entire vial.

Rin hoped like hell there hadn't been Demerol in that first syringe or Onigumo really was going to die. Banishing that personal fear into a dark cage, while the nurse within her surged forward to take control of the situation, Rin tied off Naraku's arm, grabbed a saline cartridge out of her bag by the door and praying to any god that would listen that she could spike a vein and not waste the precious Narcan, she slammed the antidote hard and fast into Naraku's cold, limp arm.

She counted to five before his eyes rolled back down, and taking a huge lungful of air, the obtunded physician came up out of unconsciousness with a wordless scream. His wild eyes bugged out at her in shock and he breathed in gasping, but very regular breaths, trying to come back to terms with continued life.

Rin leaned hard into his white, drawn face and grabbing his chin, forced Naraku to see her; "Was that Demerol? Answer me!" she asked, trying to keep the relief out of her voice.

"Fentanyl.", was the rasping, hoarse answer. Naraku blinked at her, his reply instinct more than conscious thought.

"Oh thank god…" Rin drooped on her knees and threw the locks on both his and her syringes so no one got hurt any worse than they already were.

"Where's the rest of the Narcan?" she asked in a tired voice. Naraku was coming back to his body, pinching his eyes shut against the headache clawing at his oxygen-starved brain.

"In my bag, in the office – under the stethoscope…" he groaned.

The slap upside his head caught Naraku completely off guard and he nearly hit his face on the floor between his legs from the force of Rin's parting shot as she stepped over him to locate more of the antidote.

"Get up, Doctor Onigumo – it's time to go to work." she called out sternly.

"You're always late on your rounds, Nurse Taisho – what's your hurry today?" Naraku smirked and tongued the inside of his check where she'd made him bite himself with her force.

"Some asshole physician is always giving me shit for that – I wish that fucker would just eat shit and die." Rin laughed back, mostly serious

"Fuck… that is a hard way to wake up…", Naraku groaned to himself and when Rin came back out of his office, two ampoules of Narcan clicking safely in her wounded hand, he captured her hard against him, mouthing the purple-black bruise he'd left upon her.

"Are you okay, Onigumo?" she asked, both halves of her twining self concerned for her maniacal lover's health.

"I'm not well, but I'm better, Taisho." he rasped into her ear with a sick laugh.

"Fine – then move your junkie ass. We're going to be late." she taunted and wiggled out of his grasp.


	12. Chapter 12 epilogue

EPILOGUE

Kagome readjusted her seat behind the main desk. Damn if she wasn't sore… and sleepy. Her mind flashed a snapshot of white-blue eyes staring hard at her from between her own trembling thighs and blushing, the charge nurse distracted herself by answering the phone ringing suddenly before her.

Rin Taisho, RN walked calmly past her, next to Naraku Onigumo, MD and when he stopped at the rack of charts to start seeing patients, Kagome never heard the canned voice in her ear, repeating a critically low potassium value for room 7109…hello?... hello?...

Had she seen Rin casually yank on that long fishbone braid hanging down Onigumo's dark purple coated back and did she see him immediately shoot her a smoldering gaze that promised the very things Kagome was trying so hard not to think about right this very minute? Higurashi Kagome gaped like a koi without a pond and after a moment, the lab tech on the other end of the phone line decided to just call back later.

The ICU must be having some kind of morning, he figured.


End file.
